Suspect arrested after French soldier injured in knife attack at Gare de l’Est station
French soldiers and police outside the Gare de l’Est train station Credit: AFP A soldier guarding a major Parisian railway station on Monday was stabbed by a man armed with a knife, who was then arrested, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.
The attack at the Gare de l’Est station in northern Paris came less than two weeks before the start of the Olympic Games in the French capital.
The soldier’s life was not in danger, Mr Darmanin said on X, formerly Twitter, while a police source told AFP he had suffered a knife wound “between the shoulder blades”.
The 40-year-old suspect was arrested by other soldiers on patrol while the wounded man was taken to hospital “conscious”, the source said.
The public prosecutor in Paris has opened an investigation into attempted murder, which it said would seek to establish “the circumstances and the motivation”.
The suspect is a Frenchman born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a police source said.
The French soldier was wounded in the shoulder Credit: AFP He “said he is Christian and shouted ‘God is great’ in French” at the moment of the attack, another police source added.
The suspect said he attacked the soldier “because the military kills people in his country”, the second source said.
A security perimeter was set up on one side of the station in the wake of the stabbing, with police still present around midnight (10pm GMT) some two hours after the incident.
“Thoughts to the soldier injured tonight at the Gare de l’Est,” Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu wrote on X, paying tribute to the French troops protecting citizens.
Soldiers stand guard outside the station after the attack Credit: AFP The soldier was deployed within Operation Sentinelle, a 3,000-strong unit which patrols prominent sites such as railway stations, places of worship, schools and theatres, after a string of deadly Islamic extremist attacks in 2015.
Soldiers in the Sentinelle force have been targeted in the past.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal placed an additional 3,000 troops on standby for Sentinelle.
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