The man who attacked police officers patrolling in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, shouting “This is for Syria!”, was a mature student who had not been suspected of radicalisation, a French government spokesman has said.
Christopher Castaner told RTL radio on Wednesday that police were quickly able to classify the hammer attack as a terrorist act because of “the words he said”.
An officer was slightly injured in the attack on Tuesday and the attacker remains in hospital after being shot by police.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the incident, but police searching the man’s residence outside Paris found a declaration of allegiance to the Islamic State group, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
A student identity card showed he is from Algeria and 40 years old. He was reported to be working on his thesis for his doctorate.
The University of Lorraine’s president, Pierre Mutzenhardt, said the man was enrolled as one of its students and had been working since 2014 on a thesis about North African media.
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He said the man previously worked as a journalist for North African media.
“There’d been no difficulties with him. Nothing strange had been detected,” he said.
His thesis director, Arnaud Mercier, told broadcaster BFM that the suspect spoke Swedish, Arabic and French and his CV mentioned that he had worked as a journalist in Sweden and Algeria.
“He was someone who believed a lot in democratic ideals, the expression of free thinking, in journalism,” Mr Mercier said.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, foretold that one day he’d be a jihadi who’d want to kill a policeman in the name of I don’t know what cause.”
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