Paris stabbing suspect wasn’t on police radar, minister says

A young man stabbed two people on Sept. 25 outside the former Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were killed in 2015, and a terrorism investigation has been opened into the new attack, authorities said.

The suspected assailant had been arrested a month ago for carrying a screwdriver but was not on police radar for Islamic radicalization, France's interior minister said. He said the screwdriver was considered a weapon, but did not explain why.

Two people were wounded in Friday's attack, and two suspects were arrested, although the links between the two suspects weren't immediately clear. The main suspect, a young man with speckles of blood on his forehead and wearing orange gym shoes, was arrested on the steps of the Bastille Opera in eastern Paris, authorities said. The site is not far from where Friday's attack took place, outside the building where the weekly Charlie Hebdo was located before the 2015 attack.

The interior minister said the assailant arrived in France three years ago as an unaccompanied minor, apparently from Pakistan, but his identity was still being verified.

"Manifestly it's an act of terrorism," Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in an interview with public broadcaster France-2. "Obviously, there is little doubt. It's a new bloody attack against our country, against journalists, against this society."

France's counterterrorism prosecutor said earlier that authorities suspect a terrorist motive because of the place and timing of the stabbings: in front of the building where Charlie Hebdo was based until the radical extremist attack on its cartoonists, and at a time when suspects in the 2015 attack are on trial across town.

Prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said that...