PARIS: French authorities have charged and detained four Pakistanis suspected of links to a meat cleaver attack by a compatriot outside the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly that wounded two people, the national counter-terrorism prosecutor’s office said on Friday.

The four male suspects, aged 17 to 21, were in contact with the attacker, said a sou­rce familiar with the case.

They are suspected of being aware of the attacker’s plot and inciting him to carry it out, according to another judicial source close to the investigation.

Three of them were char­ged on Friday with taking part in a terrorist conspira­cy and placed in pre-trial dete­n­­tion. The fourth had alrea­­dy been charged on Wednesday.

Two were arrested in the southwest Gironde department, a third in the northern port city of Caen and the last in the Paris region.

“They share his ideology and one of them expressed his hatred of France a few days before the action,” said one of the sources.

News of the charges comes two days after a Paris court convicted 13 accomplices of the gunmen who massacred Charlie Hebdo staff in January 2015.

To mark the start of that trial in early September, the magazine had in provocative style reprinted the sacrilegious sketches.

Three weeks later, a Pak­istani man reportedly woun­ded two people outside the weekly’s former offices, hac­k­ing at them with a cleaver.

The assailant, named as Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, 25, was arrested after Sept­ember’s attack on terror char­­ges and remains in custody.

He told investigators that prior to the attack he had watched “videos from Pak­is­tan” concerning the satirical magazine’s decision to republish the cartoons.

On Oct 16, a young Che­ch­­en refugee beheaded tea­cher Samuel Paty, who had shown some of the caricatures to his pupils.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2020