The French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, admitted this Monday that there was an “obvious” failure in the psychiatric follow-up of the alleged perpetrator of the knife attack near the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, on Saturday.
In the attack, a tourist with dual nationality, German and Filipino, was stabbed to death and two people were injured, beaten with hammer blows.
“There was clearly a psychiatric failure, the doctors considered on several occasions that [o suspeito] was better,” Gérald Darmanin told BFMTV.
Arrested after the attack, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a 26-year-old French-Iranian, was found guilty of Islamic radicalization and placed under a treatment order involving strict psychiatric monitoring.
French anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said on Sunday that Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group in a video he recorded before the attack.
In the video, the suspect speaks in Arabic and expresses “his support for ‘jihadists’ who operate in different regions,” such as Iraq, Syria or Yemen.
“The video was published on his account on the social network
Ricard explained that the young man converted to Islam in 2015, also highlighting that Rajabpour-Miyandoab’s mother, an exiled Iranian politician, had expressed concern to the authorities in October about her son’s attitude.
The prosecutor also confirmed that the suspect, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, had in the past contact through social networks with the individual who would kill Professor Samuel Paty in 2020, the Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov, killed by the police. after beheading the teacher.
Rajabpour-Miyandoab, who served four years in prison for planning an attack in 2016 in the La Defense financial district of Paris, benefited from a “medical check” until April 2023 due to mental problems, Ricard added.
From then on he began to be monitored by the French secret services due to his profile linked to Islamic radicalism.
Source: TSF
