PARIS: French prosecutors extended the detention of a friend of Paris knife attacker Khamzat Azimov for another 24 hours on Monday, transferring him to the domestic intelligence headquarters for questioning over the stabbing spree claimed by the so-called Islamic State group.

A source close to the inquiry said Abdoul Hakim A., like Azimov a 20-year-old of Chechen origin from Strasbourg, had been transferred from the eastern city to the offices of the DGSI intelligence agency in Paris under high security.

Azimov, a naturalised French citizen, was shot dead by police on Saturday night after stabbing a 29-year-old man to death in the busy Opera district of central Paris and wounding four other people.

A source said Hakim A. was the “individual closest” to Azimov, whose parents have also been taken into custody.

He was arrested by heavily armed, masked police on Sunday at his home in Strasbourg.

A source close to the inquiry told AFP he had been under surveillance since marrying Ines Hamza, a woman from the Paris region who tried to leave for Syria in January 2017.

Police recovered seven cellphones during a search of his home but were unable to locate the main phone he used most often.

He was escorted out in handcuffs with his face covered, wearing a t-shirt that said “Defend Grozny” — the capital of Russia’s North Caucasus region of Chechnya — with a picture of a machine gun.

At the Marie-Curie high school attended by both Azimov and Hakim A. in Strasbourg, home to a large number of Chechen refugees, officials said on Monday that a support group had been set up for both teachers and students.

The school also noted that it has been working since 2015 with local police to alert them to any signs of radicalisation among students

A former student in Strasbourg told AFP that Azimov and Hakim A. were in the same class during their final year, “and were very good friends, both Chechen — they were always together, both in school and outside”.

Azimov’s family later moved to Paris, where they were renting rooms in the northern 18th arrondissement. His parents have also been taking in for questioning.

Azimov was on both of France’s main watchlists for suspected radicals — the so-called “S file” and a more targeted File for the Prevention of Terrorist Radicalisation (FSPRT), which focuses on people judged to be terror threats — since 2016.

The government has come under fire over the fact that Azimov had been flagged as a suspected extremist, like several others behind deadly attacks including the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo gun massacre in 2015.

French officials reacted angrily to claims by the Russian republic’s strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov that France was solely to blame for Azimov’s radicalisation.

“We have no lessons to learn from a dictator who refuses even the beginning of any rule of law in his own country, and who knows perfectly well that thousands of Chechens are fighting alongside Daesh,” Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in London on Monday.

Amaq, the IS propaganda agency, released a video on Sunday in which it claimed responsibility for the attack, with footage it claimed showed Azimov pledging allegiance to the jihadist group.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2018