A series of violent attacks have French police on edge as the opening of the Paris Olympics approaches on 26 July. While the incidents do not appear to be connected, police suspect at least some are linked to terrorism.
France is on its highest state of security as it gears up to host millions of visitors, athletes and world leaders during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Police on Friday arrested a man on terror charges accused of trying to murder a taxi driver with a knife while expressing support for Palestinian militant group Hamas.
The man, known to authorities as someone who had been radicalised, stopped a taxi in the city of Le Mans on Tuesday night while brandishing a gun.
He reportedly forced the driver out of the car, bound him and attacked his neck with the blade.
The driver managed to escape to a local resident's home, where he was eventually treated by emergency services.
The assailant was arrested early on Friday morning in Yvelines, west of Paris, and is being investigated on charges of terrorism, attempted murder and kidnapping.
Police officer stabbed
Meanwhile, French prosecutors said on Friday that an attacker who stabbed a French police officer near the Champs-Elysées in Paris is also suspected of having killed a teenager earlier in the day.
A police officer shot the suspect on Thursday after he attacked another officer with a knife. The wounded officer is expected to survive.
The assailant – identified to news agencies by a source in the prefecture as a 27-year-old Senegalese national previously known to police – later died of his injuries.
The public prosecutor's office in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre revealed that the attacker is suspected of having fatally stabbed a 16 year old in an apartment in Courbevoie, northwest of the capital, earlier that day.
The attacker's parents told police that their son had been squatting the apartment. He had psychiatric problems and had already run away from the family home as well as from a psychiatric hospital, they said.
Soldier attacked
Earlier this week, a soldier was stabbed and wounded by a man armed with a knife at a railway station.
The suspect is a man with a history of psychiatric problems and violence.
Meanwhile, the authorities are also investigating whether a man who rammed a car into the terrace of a café on Wednesday evening did so deliberately.
The attacks took place just over a week before the opening of the Olympic Games, for which some 35,000 police and gendarmes and 18,000 French military personnel will be mobilised on average every day.
(with newswires)
