A Congolese immigrant who stabbed a French soldier in the back as he was patrolling Gare de l’Est, a busy railway station in eastern Paris, killed another man in 2018 but avoided trial due to supposed mental illness.
Psychiatric patient Christian Ingondo, 40, was roaming the streets of Paris ahead of the Monday evening attack, which came after thousands of criminals, including Islamic extremists, were denied access to the internal Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games precinct.
A total of 3,512 people have been banned from the area for posing a security threat to the Games, with 130 of those security check rejections due to suspects being on the French government’s terror watchlist.
This wasn’t the first stabbing Ingondo has committed.
In January 2018 he stabbed another Frenchman, 22-year-old Andy Birgitte, to dead at Châtelet–Les Halles, the central transit hub for the Paris metropolitan area, after he jostled him during peak hour.
But Ingondo was never tried for the murder as he was declare not criminally responsible by the Paris Court of Appeal in 2020, who determined he had a “probable progressive schizophrenic illness”, 20 Minutes reported.
The soldier has been hospitalised with a shoulder blade injury, and his condition is not life-threatening, with the attacker now in a psychiatric hospital under police supervision.
He was patrolling the street as a part of Opération Sentinelle, an ongoing military operation in Paris after the 2015 Islamic attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Soldiers in the Sentinelle force have also previously been targeted.
Paris will deploy 30,000 police officers every day for the Olympics, peaking at 45,000 for the opening ceremony. 18,000 military soldiers are also deployed to protect the Games, with Paris under a high security alert.
The attack comes after Paris police data showed that 77% of the solved rape cases in 2023 were committed by non-citizens. 20.3% of the population of Paris is foreign-born.
The French capital recorded 97 rapes in 2023, of which 30 were solved. 20 of the perpetrators were known to police – four for sexual assault – and most were homeless, unemployed drug addicts.
Most of the rapes were committed in or near tourist areas.
Police union chief Gregory Joron said the findings of the Paris Police Headquarters report were worrying, especially in the lead-up to the Olympic Games.
