A French soldier patrolling a business area of western Paris was stabbed in the neck on Saturday by a man who quickly fled the scene and was still being sought, a police source said.
The soldier was patrolling in uniform with two other men as part
of France’s Vigipirate anti-terrorist surveillance plan when he was
approached from behind and stabbed in the neck, with a knife or a
box-cutter, Reuters reports.
French daily Le Parisien cited police sources as saying the
suspected attacker was a bearded man of North African origin about
30 years old, and was wearing an Arab-style garment under his
jacket.
“We still don’t know the exact circumstances of the attack or the
identity of the attacker, but we are exploring all options,”
French president, Francois Hollande, said of the incident.
Hollande refused to make a connection between the incident in Paris
and the brutal murder of British military drummer, Lee Rigby, who
was beheaded in Woolwich, South East London by two men, acting out
of revenge for the UK’s involvement in Afghan and Iraqi wars.
The Police Prefect for Paris’s Hauts-de-Seine area, Pierre-Andre
Peyvel, said that despite losing a considerable amount of blood,
the injured soldier would survive and was being treated in
hospital. .
“The wound appears to be quite serious, but it’s not
life-threatening,” he told iTele news television.
Peyvel said the attacker was able to flee into a crowded shopping
area in the La Defense business neighborhood before the two other
patrolling soldiers, were able to react.
However, Peyvel declined to confirm or deny the description of the
perpetrator, which appeared in Le Parisien, saying that further
details about his identity would follow.
France is currently on high alert for attacks by Islamist militants
following its military operation in Mali this January, which
prompted threats against French interests from the North African
wing of Al-Qaeda.
Without a clear motive and reasoning for such attacks, there are
two basic explanations that people tend to believe, activist and
journalist Sukant Chandan told RT.
“People either take the French government or the British
government are lying on things like Woolwich the other day, or
what’s happening in Paris today, or they say it’s all about the
foreign policy of France or Britain,” he said. “I think that
these positions don’t hold enough substance as an
explanation.”
This article originally appeared on: RT