Paris knife and hammer attack near Eiffel Tower

On the evening of 02 December 2023, a man armed with a knife and a hammer attacked passers-by near the Eiffel Tower, in the area of the Quai de Grenelle and the Bir-Hakeim bridge in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. He stabbed to death a young German tourist, who had been born in the Philippines, and then injured two other people with the hammer: a British man and a French national. France 24 reported that the attacker shouted Allahu Akbar during the assault.

After a taxi driver intervened, the assailant fled across the Bir-Hakeim bridge before being subdued by police with a Taser and arrested. According to Euronews, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the 26-year-old French national was known to the security services and had been sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison over a foiled attack plot. He had remained on the watchlist after his release and was being followed for psychiatric problems.

French anti-terrorism prosecutors opened a terrorism investigation. France 24 reported that the man, later named as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French citizen of Iranian background who had converted to Islam, posted a video before the attack pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group and referencing conflicts including the war between Israel and Hamas. President Emmanuel Macron described the killing as a terrorist attack and offered condolences to the German victim's family.

This was a lone-actor Islamist terrorist attack carried out by a French citizen on French soil, not a Russian or other state-directed hybrid operation. The perpetrator was a known, previously convicted radical who had been on a watchlist and under psychiatric monitoring, raising questions about French preventive surveillance ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics. His allegiance to the Islamic State was self-declared in a video; there is no public evidence that IS commanded or coordinated the attack, so any operational direction should be treated as unconfirmed. The choice of a tourist landmark underscores soft-target vulnerability.