PARIS — A man who attacked a soldier at Orly Airport outside Paris on Saturday was fatally shot in what the Paris prosecutor’s office said it was investigating as a possible act of terrorism.
The attacker told soldiers he wanted to die for Allah, and had been placed under watch for radicalism during a prison term, a French prosecutor said.
The suspect, identified as French-born Ziyed Ben Belgacem, 39, held a gun to the head of a female soldier and took her assault rifle away before being shot by other soldiers, officials said.
The attack occurred shortly after the man shot at a police officer during a routine traffic stop in a Paris suburb, the French interior minister said.
François Molins, the Paris prosecutor, said the assailant intended to open fire on travelers.
Molins said Ben Belgacem, was on the government’s radar for radical Islamists. He said that after the deadly Islamic State attacks on Paris in 2015, Ben Belgacem’s home was searched as part of an investigation into radical networks.
The attack at Orly prompted a partial evacuation of the airport, the diversion of all flights, and a security sweep to determine whether the assailant had left any explosives at the airport’s two terminals, officials said. Incoming flights were diverted to nearby Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The chain of events started when the man was stopped by police in a routine identity check at 6:50 a.m. in the Paris suburb of Garges-lès-Gonesse, Bruno Le Roux, the interior minister, said. The man fired a pistol loaded with birdshot and fled. One police officer suffered minor injuries.
The assailant then hijacked a vehicle in Vitry-sur-Seine, about 8 miles north of Orly Airport, and drove to the airport, where he attacked the female soldier, who was part of a three-soldier unit patrolling the airport, said Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defense minister.
Two soldiers opened fire on the man as he attacked, killing him. No other injuries were reported.
A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said Saturday that its antiterrorism unit and the French Intelligence Service had opened an investigation into the events.
The spokeswoman said Ben Belgacem had a long police record, including arrests for robbery and drug-related offenses. She said police had taken both his brother and father into custody for questioning.
The episode Saturday came amid a heated presidential election campaign in France, with the first round of voting just five weeks away, on April 23.
Any terrorist attack so close to the election, political analysts suggest, could be seen as an opportunity by the candidates of the far right, Marine Le Pen, and the center right, François Fillion, to berate the current Socialist government and by association Emmanuel Macron, the center-left candidate, for failing to protect the French people.
The unit attacked at the airport was part of Operation Sentinel, which involves about 7,000 soldiers who patrol public areas in France, including high-profile locations like airports, areas near large tourist attractions, and train stations.
One of Orly’s two terminals, Orly-West, reopened by 1 p.m. and flights resumed.
