According to much of the coverage in the French and international media, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, the perpetrator of Saturday’s terror attack in Paris, killed a “German” tourist, and he did so to avenge the killing of Muslims in “Palestine and Afghanistan”. Or maybe even just Palestine. According to the latest coverage in the French media, Rajabpour-Miyandoab was upset that the Eiffel Tower had been lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag (this occurred nearly two months ago) and thus chose to attack in the vicinity of the famous landmark.
But the almost entirely unreported facts of the matter are as follows. The “German” tourist was in fact Filipino or, more exactly, Filipino-German, though he appears to have grown up in the Philippines and to have merely ‘inherited’ German citizenship from a German father. He was visiting Paris with his Filipina girlfriend and another, older Filipina woman (perhaps the young woman’s mother). Neither of the two women were injured in the attack.
The group of visitors can be seen in a photo taken from the young woman’s Facebook page below.
The victim, who has only been identified as “Collin” in French news reports, is Collin Christian Bröter. His own Facebook page is here. His LinkedIn Page is here. He identifies himself on his LinkedIn page as a “Philippine Registered Nurse” and the location is still given as “Bauang, Ilocos Region, Philippines”.
It is clear from the information and entries on the pages that Bröter was educated in the Philippines and was still working there until very recently (2022).
He appears to have moved to Germany in January of this year, taking up work at a nursing home in Uelzen in Lower Saxony. German citizenship law is largely based on the so-called jus sanguinis or ‘right of blood’, meaning that German citizenship is ‘inherited’ at birth from a German parent. This will presumably have facilitated Bröter’s move to Germany.
His Filipina girlfriend Lyn is also a registered nurse, who, according to her Facebook page, lives in Hannover, the capital of Lower Saxony. All of the communication on Bröter’s social media pages is in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, or English.
As will be obvious from the above photo, Rajabpour-Miyandoab will have had no idea that Bröter was “German” or had a German passport. But he may well have had some idea that Bröter and the two women were Filipinos, and, in any case, he would have had no doubt that they were East Asian.
Why is this relevant? It is relevant because there is an Islamic-State-affiliated Islamic insurgency in the Philippines and Rajabpour-Miyandoab pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in the video he recorded prior to his attack.
Indeed, just hours after Rajabpour-Miyandoab killed Bröter on Saturday evening in Paris, a Catholic mass was bombed on Sunday morning in the Philippines in a terror attack for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility. Rajabpour-Miyandoab, moreover, dedicates his video message to mujahideen fighting to establish Islamic rule all around the world, explicitly including “the guardians of the religion in East Asia”.
Why is the fact that Rajabpour-Miyandoab attacked a group of Filipino tourists being covered up? In light of the foregoing, there is a very real possibility that he deliberately chose to attack them precisely because they were Filipino or East Asian. On the other hand, the idea that he killed a “German” tourist to avenge Palestinians killed by Israel is obviously absurd.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
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