PARIS (AP) — Police found no weapons on a man held Friday at the Iranian consulate in Paris after responding to a report of a suspicious man wearing a grenade and an explosive vest, an official said.
Elite police forces and soldiers surrounded the building and blocked traffic in the area during an hours-long security intervention. The incident came at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East, and as Paris prepares to host the Summer Olympics.
The Iranian embassy has not publicly commented on the incident.
The suspect was previously convicted of setting fire to the embassy gates last year, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
He was spotted outside the consulate around 11 a.m. and a witness told police he was carrying a grenade and an explosive vest, according to a police official. The police then launched a special intervention.
No weapons were found on him or in his vehicle, the Paris police official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because police policy prohibited him from being publicly named.
Some of the police, special constables and firefighters who responded to the incident at the consulate were later seen leaving the scene after the arrest. A police cordon remained in place, but traffic in the area resumed.
Paris’ public prosecutor was informed at 2:50 p.m. of the arrest of a man leaving the Iranian consulate in the French capital’s 16th arrondissement, the prosecutor’s office said in an emailed statement to the AP.
Inside the consulate, the man “reportedly made threats of violent acts” but then left the building alone, the statement said, adding that “no explosive material was found on him or in the area around him” by police officers who found him taken into custody. .
Authorities did not name the suspect or provide information on a possible motive for his actions, but said he was born in Iran in 1963.
The public prosecutor’s office also confirmed that the suspect was known to the authorities and in October received an eight-month suspended sentence from the Paris Criminal Court for setting fire to car tires at the gate of the Iranian embassy in Paris in September 2023. a protest against the Iranian government, the statement said.
As part of that punishment, the prosecutor’s statement said, the man was also banned from carrying a weapon and given a two-year ban from appearing in the 16th district. The verdict was pending due to the defendant’s appeal, it added.
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Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson in Paris and Barbara Surk in Nice, France, contributed to this report.
