(Newswire.net — January 8, 2016) — Police killed an armed unidentified man in front of a police station in a multi ethnic neighborhood called Goutte d’Or, in the 18th arrondissement in Paris, France TV iTELE reports.
The man tried to enter the police station. He had a butcher’s knife, and he was carrying a fake explosive device. The attacker shouted “Allahu akbar”.
Police found a paper print of the ISIS flag in his pocket, with a handwritten note in Arabic from him claiming the responsibility for the attack.
“The man did have a belt with explosives, but it was fake. X-ray units established that the explosives were not real”, said a police source for Reuters.
Witnesses heard two or three gunshots, and the police quickly surrounded the area around the site of the attack.
“Police told the neighbors to close their windows and balconies. ‘It’s dangerous’ “, Anna Polonyi, a New York Times reporter, wrote on Twitter.
She also published on Twitter, a photo of the man lying on the ground outside the police station in Paris.
“The investigation is underway. The office’s anti-terror section will determine the identity of the attacker and his motivations”, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said at a press conference, at the French Capitol.
Thursday’s attack took place on the one-year anniversary of the massacre at the editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In that attack, three men with automatic rifles killed 12 people, because they had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Two policemen and ten journalists were among the victims. One of them was the chief editor of Charlie Hebdo magazine.
In France, wounds from the terrible attacks on 13 November 2015 are still fresh. In several assaults in Paris jihadists killed 130 people and more than 350 were injured.