Information is becoming clearer regarding the profile of the attacker who killed, on the evening of Saturday, December 2, a tourist and injured two other people in the Bir Hakeim district, not far from the Eiffel Tower, in Paris. The author of the attack, Armand RM, known for radical Islamism and psychiatric disorders, was arrested and is currently in police custody. The anti-terrorism prosecution has opened an investigation for assassination and attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise and for criminal terrorist association.
Born in 1997 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), the 26-year-old man was already sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison, one of which was suspended, for a planned violent action at the Defense. He was released at the end of his sentence. According to The Parisianthe author of the attack would also have considered leaving for Syria.
File for radicalization
“Born to two parents of Iranian origin, who fled the regime of the mullahs and are not Muslims”, still according to the Ile-de-France daily, Armand RM converted to Islam and was radicalized in 2015 through contact with Maximilien Thibaut. whom he meets via a site specializing in photos of graffiti, his passion”. In 2016, while he was a biology student, Armand RM, 19 years old at the time, was arrested by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) for a planned violent action in La Défense, in the west of Paris, for which he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He was released from prison after four years of detention, according to a judicial source at AFP.
The attacker also reportedly considered going to Syria to join the ranks of ISIS. During his hearing in February 2018, Armand RM, however, claimed to have deradicalized himself, which investigators doubt. He thus holds among his Facebook friends the future assassin of a couple of police officers in Magnanville in 2016, and also spoke with one of the perpetrators of the assassination of Father Hamel in his church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray ( Seine-Maritime) the same year, reveals The Parisian.
“Unstable psychological profile”
Investigators will also look into the medical monitoring of the author, a man with a “very unstable profile, very easily influenced”, according to a security source at AFP. “Whether he was medically monitored as he should have been and as he was for a time, that is a question that will arise,” said a police source. Gérald Darmanin explained, during a press briefing on Saturday evening, that the attacker was “followed as a person with very significant psychiatric disorders. He was also under psychiatric and neurological treatment”.
Armand RM lived with his parents, in Essonne, according to the Minister of the Interior. He published a video on social networks claiming responsibility for his attack, police and security sources confirmed. In it, the attacker mentions “the news, the government, the murder of innocent Muslims”, detailed the security source. At this stage, investigators do not know when it was filmed, but it was posted online “concurrently” with the act, according to this source.
He reportedly told the police who arrested him that he “could no longer bear to see Muslims die, both in Afghanistan and in Palestine.” He would also have declared that he “resented” for “what was happening in Gaza”, and that France would be “complicit in what Israel was doing” there, Gérald Darmanin further clarified.
The attack comes less than two months after that in Arras which cost the life of a teacher in mid-October and led to the Vigipirate plan being raised to the maximum “emergency attack” level.