French authorities have charged and imprisoned four Pakistanis suspected of ties to a meat cleaver attack by a comrade outside the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly that injured two people, the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office said. The four male suspects, aged 17 to 21, were in touch with the assailant, stated a close source.
They are presumed of being knowledgeable of the attacker’s action and prompting him to carry it out, according to another judicial source proximate to the probe. Three of them were arrested on Friday for taking part in a terrorist plot and placed in pretrial confinement. The fourth had already been captured on Wednesday. Two were arrested in the southwest Gironde department, a third in the northern port city of Caen and the last in the Paris region.
“They share his ideology and one of them expressed his hatred of France a few days before the action,” said one of the sources. Information of the arrests came two days after a Paris court sentenced 13 abettors of the gunmen who slaughtered Charlie Hebdo staff in January 2015. To mark the beginning of that attempt in early September, the magazine had, in typically rousing style, reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Three weeks later, a Pakistani man injured two people near the weekly’s former offices, hewing at them with a cleaver. The assailant, named Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, 25, was arrested after September’s attack on terror charges and stays in custody. He told detectives that, before the attack, he had watched “videos from Pakistan” regarding the satirical magazine’s determination to republish the cartoons.
On Oct 16, a young Chechen refugee decapitated teacher Samuel Paty, who had exhibited some of the caricatures to his students. Two weeks later, three people were slaughtered when a young Tunisian recently reached in Europe moved on a stabbing fling at a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice. President Emmanuel Macron’s government has instructed lawmaking to embark on an extreme Islamist movement in France, a bill that has flared outrage and protests in some Muslim countries.
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