Christian man who shouted ‘God is great’ as he stabbed soldier in Paris arrested

French soldier stands guard outside the Gare de l'Est train station. (AFP)

PARIS: A 40-year-old man was arrested on Monday on suspicion of stabbing and injuring a soldier who was guarding a major Parisian railway station, 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, Darmanin said on X, while a police source told AFP that he had suffered a knife wound “between the shoulder blades.”
The suspect was quickly arrested following the attack just before 10:00 p.m. (2000 GMT) by other soldiers on patrol while the injured man was taken to hospital “conscious,” the source said.
The suspect is a 40-year-old born in the Democratic Republic of Congo who obtained French nationality in 2006, a police source said.
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.
The man was known to authorities in France over a 2018 murder that saw him detained in a psychiatric facility, two police sources told AFP.
In 2018, he fatally stabbed a 22-year-old man at the Chatelet-les-Halles metro station in central Paris.
He was declared not legally responsible for the murder due to diminished responsibility and was never tried, according to a court judgment verified by AFP.
Contacted by AFP, neither the public prosecution service nor the national anti-terrorist prosecution service responded.
“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.
He said the soldier was part of a special military operation to protect sensitive sites in Paris that was deployed following the 2015 Islamist attacks on the satirical Charlie Hebdo newspaper.
In February 2017, an Egyptian attacked soldiers with a machete outside the world-renown Louvre museum in central Paris, shouting “Allah akbar” — which means “God is great” in Arabic.