Paris Assailant Has Links to Perpetrators of Three Recent French Terror Attacks

Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, the Franco-Iranian terrorist who stabbed a tourist to death and injured two other people with a hammer on Saturday, not far from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, had contact with the perpetrators of no less than three recent French terror attacks. One of these contacts was the assassin of Samuel Paty, the history teacher who was stabbed to death and whose body was then decapitated in 2020 after he showed his students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class on freedom of expression.

In 2018, Rajabpour-Miyandoab was already convicted of forming part of a plot to attack the Parisian business district of La Défense. In addition, citing police and judicial sources, both the French daily Le Parisen and the news channel BFM report that Rajabpour-Miyandoab had contact with the following three perpetrators of notorious French terror attacks:

Larossi Aballa, who in June 2016 killed the police officer Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his wife Jennifer Schneider, also a police employee, at their home in Magnanville near Paris. After taking her hostage, Aballa would slit Schneider’s throat in front of the couple’s three-year-old son who survived the attack.

Adel Kermiche, who, just one month later, along with an accomplice, killed Father Jacques Hamel, stabbing him and slitting his throat following a mass at the Saint-Étienne church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, also not far from Paris.

And Abdoullakh Anzorov, the killer of Samuel Paty. Paty was killed outside his school in the Parisian suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

More alarmingly still, Rajabpour-Miyandoab is reported to have had contact with Anzorov in early October 2020, shortly after his own release from prison and just two weeks before the assassination of Samuel Paty.

Much has been made of the fact that Rajabpour-Miyandoab is a French citizen who was born in France. But it should be noted that of the three aforementioned terrorists, only Anzorov was not a French citizen who was born in France.

According to Le Parisien, “Armand” Rajabpour-Miyandoab, who was in fact born Iman Rajabpour-Miyandoab, has since adopted the name “Amine”.

It appears, indeed, that he does not come from a religious family, and, in any case, the overwhelming majority of Iranian Muslims are, of course, Shias, who are themselves regarded as heretics by Sunni fundamentalist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Speaking in Arabic in a video recorded prior to his attack, Rajabpour-Miyandoab pledged allegiance to the latter.

The main victim of the Paris attack has been widely described as a “German tourist”, but he appears in fact to be a native of the Philippines who, according to Le Parisien, only recently moved to Germany to take up employment in a nursing home. The fact that the victim is Filipino could be of significance, since just hours after the Paris attack, a Catholic mass was struck by a terror attack on Sunday morning at Mindanao State University in the Philippines. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the latter attack.

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.