Two people were seriously injured in a knife attack Friday near the former offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the site of a 2015 terrorist attack, the Paris police told CNN.
The two victims are in a serious condition but their lives are not in danger, according to the police spokesperson. Police had previously said there were four people wounded in the attack
One person has now been arrested near Place de la Bastille, in Paris's 11th district, but the police said it was not yet clear if they were the suspected attacker.
The victims are employees of French documentary production company Premières Lignes, the firm's founder Paul Moreira told BFM TV.
Moreira said it “all happened very quickly” and that “a few blows were given to the two people in front of the office.” Moreira said the victims were attacked with a “sort of cleaver.”
French Prime Minister Jean Castex cut short an event in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis in the wake of the incident. “An armed attack was carried out in the 11th arrondissement of Paris in front of the old Charlie Hebdo office,” he said. A perimeter has been set up around the area.
The stabbing comes amid a trial of suspects alleged to have been accomplices to a series of January 2015 terrorist attacks which began with a massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices and ended with a siege at a kosher supermarket two days later.
The suspects are accused of having provided logistical support to the perpetrators – brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi, and their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly – and face charges of participating in a terrorist criminal association.
A total of 17 people were killed in the 2015 attacks, which took place in the French capital over three days.
Twelve of those were murdered when the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo building and opened fire during its editorial meeting on January 7.
The victims included the magazine's editor, Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, several cartoonists and columnists, and a protection officer assigned to protect Charb, who had been the target of threats over the magazine's publication, in 2006, of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
The following day, January 8, policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe was shot dead by Coulibaly in the southern Paris suburb of Montrouge.
On January 9, Coulibaly took several people hostage at a kosher superrmarket in the eastern Paris suburb of Porte de Vincennes. Four hostages were killed. Coulibaly was killed by police when they moved in to end the siege and rescue 15 other hostages.
The Kouachi brothers were shot dead by police in a separate operation in Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, the same day.
To mark the start of the trial earlier this month, Charlie Hebdo republished the controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, along with a tribute to the employees who lost their lives in 2015.
In a statement, the magazine described the cartoons as “part of history, and one cannot rewrite history, neither can it be erased.”
