Zahir Hasan Mehmud, a 25-year-old assailant born in Pakistan, has been investigated by a judge for criminal association with terrorists and has been ordered to be detained, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) said.
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The suspect previously admitted that he had lied to the police, claiming that he was 18 years old and arrived in the country as a minor, the chief prosecutor in the case said.
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The man, who called the attack by the French government an “act of Islamist terrorism”, had falsely identified himself as 18-year-old Hasan A., who was born in Mandi Bahaudina, Pakistan.
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He arrived in France in 2018 with a fake identity that gave him access to social security assistance for minors, National Counter-Terrorism Prosecutor Jean-François Richter told a news conference.
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After Friday’s attack, investigators suspected the attacker’s allegations when they found a photo of an identity document on the man’s cell phone, suggesting that he was in fact 25-year-old Zahir Hassan Mehmud.
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“He eventually admitted that this was his true identity and that he was 25 years old,” Ricard said. The attacker had not caught the attention of any government intelligence before the attack on Friday.
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With this identity, he appeared in a pre-attack video in which he said he was taking revenge for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in Charlie Hebdo magazine. He linked his actions to the republishing of these cartoons in this magazine.
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It has already been reported that two people were injured in an attack with a butcher’s knife in Paris on Friday. According to Premieres Lignes, a television investigative journalism production company, the two stabbed are its employees, a man and a woman who had quit smoking. The company had helped produce a documentary about the 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office, which took place after the magazine published cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
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Seven people, including the attacker himself, were detained in connection with Friday’s attack. On Saturday, police reported that a man who had once lived with him in the same apartment but released one of those detained the previous day had been detained.
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The new attack comes at a time when alleged accomplices of the 2015 terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office are being tried in Paris.
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On January 7, 2015, brothers Sheriff and Said Kuyashi in Paris killed 12 people, including well-known magazine cartoonists, in the Charlie Hebdo editorial office. A day later, an acquaintance of the brothers, Amedia Kulibali, was killed by traffic police near the French capital, and on January 9, four more people in a kosher shop in Paris.
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The killings were the first in a series of Islamist terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016, killing more than 230 people. The Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility for several of them.
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On September 2, 14 people accused of supporting Islamic extremists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo editorial office and a kosher store began in Paris.
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Charlie Hebdo recently republished cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which is considered an insult in much of the Islamic world. New threats to the magazine.
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The perpetrator of the attack on Friday told investigators that he had kept clashes with Charlie Hebdo employees, unaware that the magazine’s editorial staff had been moved to another location, which is being kept secret due to security risks.
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