Paris police kill man with knife on anniversary of Charlie Hebdo attacks

The Paris prosecutor’s office says it is opening a terrorism investigation after a man carrying a butcher’s knife and wearing fake explosives showed up at a police station in northern Paris and was killed by police.

Hollande, flanked by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, inaugurated the first plaque at Charlie Hebdo’s former offices, where cartoonists who were household names in France, nicknamed Cabu, Wolinski and Charb, were killed along with nine others.

Police said they are treating the incident as a potential terrorist attack.

No official events are planned for Thursday, although President Francois Hollande is due to address the police.

Luc Poignant, a police union official, said the man cried out “Allahu akbar”, Arabic for “God is great”.

The country remains on its highest terror-alert level, which was put in effect after the coordinated attacks in November that left 130 people dead. They said the man has not yet been identified. All three gunmen died.

In the second wave of attacks on November 13, Islamist militants mowed down people in Paris cafes and a concert hall and attacked a stadium in what was the nation’s worst post-war atrocity.

The commemorations have been accompanied by a flurry of book releases and new documentaries on the subject, as well as a resurgence of questions about whether French intelligence and police services failed to adequately assess security threats against the newspaper, which had been under police protection.

The French president briefly met with some of the survivors of the attack inside the supermarket, including Lassana Bathily, a Mali-born employee of market who hid a group of hostages in the store’s underground stockroom.

But in an exclusive interview on CNN’s Amanpour, Laurent Sourisseau, Charlie Hebdo’s head of publication, who goes by the nickname of Riss, stands by the illustration.

Charlie Hebdo’s anniversary edition blames Islamic fundamentalists, organized religion, an irresolute government and intelligence failures for the 2015 violence in France.

“This past year we’ve had to invest almost two million euros to secure our office, which is an enormous sum”, he said. The event triggered an outpouring of sympathy for France and the paper itself, turning Charlie Hebdo into a symbol for press freedom.

The attack, which occurred in Barbes, near the police station in Goutte D’Or, took place on the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings, the first of deadly jihadist attacks that have roiled the French capital over the past 12 months. “And now I don’t really know what it means”.