PARIS – The man who stabbed a tourist near the Eiffel Tower in Paris pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group in a video posted on social media, French anti-terrorism prosecutors said Sunday.

He is known to the authorities as a radicalized Islamist who maintains links on social media to the perpetrators of other recent attacks in France. He was also subjected to strict psychological monitoring because of mental health problems, senior prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard told reporters.

He added that the man’s mother had expressed concern about him as recently as October, but that there was insufficient evidence to take legal action at this point.

The attack late Saturday came as France was on high alert against the backdrop of the war between Israel and Hamas and after a series of apparent isolated attacks in the country.

The knife attacker, identified as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, is a French citizen who was born in 1997 to Iranian parents.

He killed a 23-year-old man, identified as a German-Filipino citizen, with two blows of a hammer and four with a knife around 9:30 p.m. (2030 GMT).

Rajabpour-Miyandoab shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) and fled across the Seine via the Bir Hakeim Bridge after a taxi driver intervened.

When he encountered a police patrol on the other side, he claimed to be wearing an explosive belt before running further and hitting two passers-by – a 66-year-old British citizen and a 60-year-old Frenchman – with the hammer.

He was eventually stopped with two Taser shots and taken into custody.

Ministers led by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne met for a security meeting on Sunday, with the head of government writing on X, formerly Twitter, that “we will not give in to terrorism”.

CONTACT WITH OTHER ATTACKERS

“At the end of October 2023, the attacker’s mother expressed concern about her son’s behavior because he had turned against himself. But there was nothing to justify re-prosecution,” Ricard said.

An X account opened by Rajabpour-Miyandoab in early October showed “many posts about Hamas, Gaza or Palestine in general,” he added.

There the attacker published a video in Arabic in which he presented himself as an IS fighter stationed in Afghanistan.

“In this video, he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and expressed support for jihadists … in Africa, Iraq, Syria, Sinai … Yemen or Pakistan,” Ricard said.

According to prosecutors, Rajabpour-Miyandoab, whose family is not religious, converted to Islam when he was 18 and began consuming large amounts of ISIS propaganda.

He had plans to join the Islamic State group in Iraq or Syria in 2016 and was friends on Facebook with a man who then killed two police officers in their home in Magnanville, near Paris – although the two did not exchange messages.

Later that year he was arrested for planning an attack. After his release, he ended up serving four years in prison and was under strict observation.

This surveillance was reinforced by his social media contacts, including with the future murderer of the teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded in front of his school by an Islamist attacker in 2020.

Rajabpour-Miyandoab was also undergoing mandatory psychiatric treatment for mental health issues until April this year, Ricard said.

Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau had previously said that Rajabpour-Miyandoab would be monitored “in a way that does not mean he needs to be hospitalized” because of his mental health problems.

“As is often the case in these cases, there is a mixture of ideology, an easily influenced person and, unfortunately, psychiatry,” he added.

In addition to Rajabpour-Miyandoab himself, three people were in custody on Sunday afternoon, Ricard said, “who belonged to the perpetrator’s family or social circle.”

HIGH TENSIONS

After Sunday’s security meeting, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin urged that authorities should have “the opportunity to request (or require) compulsory treatment” for people with mental health problems who are believed to be radicalized.

France remains “exposed to the long-term threat of radical Islamism,” Darmanin added, calling for “a very strong criminal justice response.”

France has suffered several attacks by Islamist extremists, including the Islamic State group’s suicide and gun attacks in Paris in November 2015 that killed 130 people.

There has been a relative lull in recent years, although authorities have warned that the threat remains.

But after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent bombing of the Gaza Strip, tensions have risen in France, which has a large Jewish and Muslim population.