France arrests four Pakistanis for September terror attack

NEW DELHI: France has arrested four people of Pakistani origin this week suspected of links to the attack in late September by a young Pakistani outside the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly that injured two people.

The four were detained on Monday and one was already charged on Wednesday with taking part in a terrorist conspiracy, reported news agencies Reuters and AFP.

The arrested are suspected of being aware of the attacker's plot and inciting him to carry it out confirming a report first published in the Le Parisien daily.


The attacker, named as Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, 25, was arrested after the attack on terror charges and remains in custody.

The news of the arrests comes two days after a Paris court convicted 13 accomplices of the gunmen who massacred staff in January 2015 at Charlie Hebdo, which had published the blasphemous caricatures, according to the news agencies.

On October 16, a young Chechen refugee beheaded teacher Samuel Paty who had shown some of the blasphemous caricatures to his pupils. And on October 29, three people were killed when a young Tunisian recently arrived in Europe went on a stabbing spree in a church in French city of Nice.