Paris stabbing attack outside former Charlie Hebdo headquarters

On the morning of 25 September 2020, a man wielding a meat cleaver attacked two people on the street outside 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, the building that until 2015 housed the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The two victims were employees of the television production company Premières Lignes, struck while on a cigarette break near the entrance; both suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries. No one was killed. Police arrested a suspect nearby shortly afterwards, and the Paris prosecutor's office opened a terrorism investigation.

The assailant was identified as Zaheer Hassan Mehmood, a Pakistani national in his mid-twenties. Investigators found he had recorded a video beforehand declaring he sought vengeance against Charlie Hebdo for republishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and that he had wrongly believed the magazine was still based at the address, unaware it had moved to a secret location after the January 2015 massacre. The attack occurred while the trial over that 2015 attack was under way, weeks after Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons to mark the trial's opening. French authorities subsequently arrested and charged several other people of Pakistani origin suspected of being aware of, or inciting, the plot. France's interior minister described the incident as clearly an act of Islamist terrorism.

This was an act of jihadist terrorism, not foreign-state hybrid activity. French authorities treated it from the outset as Islamist terrorism, and the assailant's own pre-attack video framed it as revenge for Charlie Hebdo's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The targeting of the magazine's former premises, the timing during the 2015-attack trial, and the religious-grievance motive all point to ideologically driven Islamist violence by a lone attacker with a small support network. There is no evidence linking it to any state actor or sabotage campaign.