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Assailant Near Louvre Is Shot by French Soldier Assailant Near Louvre Is Shot by French Soldier
(about 11 hours later)
PARIS — A man with a large knife was shot by a French soldier on Friday after he lunged at four soldiers, shouting “God is great” in Arabic, near the Louvre Museum in Paris, the police said, raising tensions in a country that has been the site of several terrorist attacks in the past two years. PARIS — A man armed with two large knives and shouting “God is great” in Arabic lunged at a military patrol near an entrance to the Louvre on Friday, causing little harm, but rattling a city already on edge over terrorist attacks and casting another shadow over its international image.
The Paris police chief, Michel Cadot, said that the man, who was seriously wounded, had been carrying two backpacks but that there was no indication they had contained explosives. The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a terrorism investigation, but the authorities said the suspect’s motives were unclear. A soldier opened fire, hitting the attacker several times, but not before he slashed at one of the other soldiers, causing minor injuries.
The suspect was shot five times at the bottom of a stairway that connects the Tuileries Garden with the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping center through which visitors can also gain access to the museum. But he did not reach the typically crowded mall itself, nor the main entrance of the museum. One soldier has a minor scalp injury. The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attacker, who was 29 years old, was believed to be an Egyptian who arrived in France on Jan. 26 from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, on a visa he obtained last November.
France has been under a state of emergency for more than a year, since attacks in and around the city in November 2015 left 130 people dead, and it has since been hit by several deadly assaults. The intervention by soldiers from the 1er Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes, an airborne unit based in Pamiers, in southwestern France, “ended a terrorist attack and enabled the arrest of its perpetrator, who by all indications was very determined,” Mr. Molins said.
Although the effectiveness of deploying soldiers alongside police officers and gendarmes to protect civilians has been questioned — about 10,000 soldiers around the country are now on patrol — their presence is an increasingly accepted feature of the country’s efforts to confront the terrorist threat. The assault took place on a stairway leading down to the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping mall that lies between the subway station closest to the museum and one of the museum’s entrances.
President Trump said on Twitter: “A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.” But there was no publicly available information to support his claim about the assailant. The attack was so close to the Louvre that it lit up social media networks. Within a couple hours of the assault, President Trump wrote on Twitter that the man was a “radical Islamic terrorist,” although the French authorities said it was too early to establish whether he had ties to any terrorist groups.
The authorities cordoned off the large central courtyard of the Louvre, which has long been considered a possible target of extremists, and the museum was put under tight security. Mr. Molins, who is known for sticking to the facts, refrained from saying anything about the man’s motivations, but said that his passport had two visas to Turkey, in 2015 and 2016, and that he also had a visa for Saudi Arabia. He had a residency document for the United Arab Emirates.
Photographs posted on Twitter showed visitors to the museum sitting on the floor, checking their smartphones and then leaving after the authorities had brought the situation under control. Mr. Molins did not say where the man might have traveled in Turkey. Until recently, a stretch of the eastern Turkish border with Syria was highly porous, and many people slipped into territory held by the Islamic State in Syria’s northeast.
According to the French Interior Ministry, about 250 visitors were in the museum at the time of the attack — in the morning, when the venue is less crowded. It also draws far fewer visitors in the winter, low season for tourism, than in the summer. The man was not known to the French security authorities, but he was identified through fingerprints and a photograph taken when he obtained his visa, Mr. Molins said.
Those who were inside the museum were moved to secure areas, the police chief said, and no one else was allowed to enter. The roughly 1,000 people who were inside the blocked-off area were being let out around midday. The suspect had rented an apartment for one week, paying about $1,830, in a well-heeled neighborhood just four subway stops from the Louvre. Two days after arriving in Paris, he bought two military-grade 16-inch knives at an arms store in central Paris for about $730, according to the authorities.
A second person has been taken into custody, said Pierre-Henry Brandet, an Interior Ministry spokesman, but that person’s connection to the events at the Louvre is unclear. France has suffered more terrorist attacks and attempted attacks in recent years than any other country in Europe, and security officials believe that the country and especially its police and military forces, remain a target of choice for Islamic extremists.
As the tensions of the morning eased, the main courtyard that surrounds the glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei, which anchors the museum’s main entrance, was still empty because the police had sealed it off. Some of those attacks involve knives and were carried out by people who say they were inspired by the example of the Islamic State even if they had never traveled to Syria or Iraq or sworn allegiance to the organization. Mr. Molins noted that Friday’s attack occurred exactly two years after a similar attack on soldiers in Nice.
The police later reduced the size of the security perimeter, but the culture minister, Audrey Azoulay, said the museum would be closed for the rest of the day, despite earlier optimism that visitors would be allowed back in during the afternoon. The museum is expected to reopen on Saturday. In just the past 13 months, there have been at least four attacks in France using knives, including one instance in which an off-duty police officer and wife were stabbed to death by a man who then filmed himself claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, broadcasting the video on Facebook.
The Rue de Rivoli, which runs along the northeast side of the museum and is lined with shops and restaurants catering to tourists and occupying centuries-old arcaded buildings, remained at least partly open to pedestrian traffic, although other streets were blocked off. In St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a small town in Normandy, a 19-year-old man slit the throat of an elderly priest as he was saying Mass last July. The young man and an accomplice, who were fatally shot by the police, had proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State just before the murder.
Police officers and soldiers were stationed at street corners in the area while tourists walked around, seemingly unconcerned — if curious — about what had happened, checking their phones, taking photographs and asking journalists for information. Then there were the shocking assaults that claimed many more lives. On July 14, a man driving a truck plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the southern city of Nice, killing 86 people. And on Nov. 13, 2015, three attacks carried out by 10 Islamic State terrorists in and around Paris took the lives of 130 people.
Marie-Agnès Tiberghien, 69, who lives in Paris, said that she had not heard gunfire while she and about 200 others were attending a class on the Italian Renaissance at the École du Louvre, an art history school in the Louvre complex, but she added that the threat had soon became apparent. Although the Louvre attack was swiftly contained and involved only one assailant, it was likely to add to the woes of the museum and the city, where the number of visitors declined significantly in 2016 because of successive terrorist attacks and attempted attacks. The number of visitors to the Louvre was down 15 percent from 2015, and the number of foreign visitors fell, notably from Russia, Japan, China and Brazil.
After an alarm sounded, staff members entered the conference room where the class was being held and told people to stay where they were, she said. Friday’s attack also coincided with the city’s final presentation of its bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, casting something of a pall over a day that Paris officials had hoped would not be associated with terrorism.
“Someone came to inform us every 15 minutes, so that we wouldn’t panic,” she said, adding that staff members and the police had been “very reassuring.” Still, the quick response by the military was likely to ease criticism about the expense and efficacy of using soldiers alongside the police to fight terrorism.
Ms. Tiberghien and others left the building around 1 p.m., but only after they had been asked to open their coats and bags for inspection and to put their hands in the air. When terrorists carried out a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall during the November 2015 attacks, soldiers were nearby but were not under orders to act and were unable to aid the police, raising questions about their usefulness. While the situation on Friday was different — the soldiers were acting in self-defense — it was described repeatedly by politicians and senior government officials as a display of preparedness and “sang-froid.”
France has been on edge because of the serious threat posed by terrorism, most notably the coordinated assaults in November 2015. In June, an off-duty police officer and his companion were stabbed to death by a man who then filmed himself claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, broadcasting the video on Facebook. About 10,000 soldiers are deployed throughout France, with 3,500 in the Paris region alone.
On July 14, a man driving a truck plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the southern city of Nice, killing 86. Twelve days later, two men burst into a church during morning Mass in the northern town of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray and slaughtered a priest, Jacques Hamel. Many people were also impressed by the calm efficiency displayed by the staffs of both the museum and the Carrousel du Louvre.
Many of the assailants have said they were inspired by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but several had links to a wider network of terrorists. The museum had several rooms designated as secure places, and guards escorted visitors to those areas.
Over the summer, most notably during the Euro 2016 soccer championship, France heightened security measures and conducted raids of possible terrorist cells. Bastien Lopez, 21, an intern at the museum, said he was at work when “all of a sudden we saw a huge flow of people coming in the museum, and the people in charge of the security shut down the three main access doors.”
Some of the suspects were French citizens, some showed no sign of radicalization, and women have emerged among their ranks. “Then they asked us to follow an itinerary that led us into a specific room,” he said, “where we stayed confined for two hours and a half.” He stayed in one of the rooms of the department of Islamic art, in the museum’s basement, with a few hundred people.
In November, seven men who the authorities said were planning terrorist attacks were arrested in the eastern city of Strasbourg and the southern port city of Marseille. “It wasn’t a rush: Everything went very smoothly,” Mr. Lopez added. “We were not piled up; we could all sit on the floor. Some people took a nap.”
With presidential elections scheduled in a few months, and more than two years after the attacks on the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, questions of how to deal with terrorism and security remain a source of tension in France. “The tourists reacted super well. The security persons were given instructions that we translated in English and in Chinese.”
Thomas, a 21-year-old who declined to give his surname, said he was doing maintenance work on electronic screens in the underground mall when he heard gunfire nearby.
He suspected an attack, yet his first reaction was not fear, but a “survival instinct,” fueled by a “surge of adrenaline,” he recalled as he stood near a police cordon a few hours later.
“I followed the protocol, which was to leave through the emergency exits, since we were in one of the stores,” he said. “I evacuated, and I took two people with me.”