PARIS – At 7:45 this morning, a man attacked passengers at the Gare de Lyon in Paris with a knife and a hammer, one of the busiest railway stations in the capital. The security officer who confronted him was seriously injured but is not in danger of dying, while two other people suffered minor injuries. All three are hospitalized. According to the initial information provided by the police, the man remained silent while attacking.
He then set fire to the backpack he had with him before being neutralized by law enforcement. He is a 32-year-old man, a citizen of Mali, and in possession of an Italian driver’s license, who reportedly has psychiatric problems. The investigations are trying to clarify the motive for the action, and at the moment the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office has not yet been involved. A suspect has been arrested, who had shown an Italian driver’s license.
Trains depart from the Gare de Lyon to Lyon – the most frequently used and profitable route – to many locations in the south of France and also to Italy, although connections with the peninsula have been interrupted for several months due to a landslide in the Maurienne valley. Patrols of soldiers from the Sentinelle operation, launched after the terrorist attacks of 2015, are monitoring the situation. Weekend train traffic is resuming, while political controversy immediately erupts linking immigration, psychiatric problems, and terrorism. Over the years, France has experienced dozens of such attacks carried out by people with mental disorders who sometimes – but not always, as in this case – have invoked Allah while randomly attacking passersby.
The line between Islamist terrorism and psychiatry is blurred: in these cases, the far right accuses the authorities of hiding the terrorist nature of the action behind mental disorders, while the far left emphasizes the psychiatric problems of the assailant, protesting against the “Islamophobic obsession” of those who speak of terrorism. On that occasion, the man had left a video claiming allegiance to Islamism and had said he had struck to avenge the Palestinian victims in Gaza. Febrero 3, 2024 | 10:25