A fully veiled woman carrying a knife stopped at Paris Austerlitz train station

“See something, say something.” A 37-year-old woman was reported by an intrigued traveler on Sunday because she didn’t seem to want to take a train.

Since a propaganda video was posted in French on Twitter, on January 1st, 2020, showing an ISIS jihadist explaining how to attack “miscreants” in France with a “simple blade” when one cannot travel to Syria for the “jihad”, knife attacks seem to be on the rise.

In Villejuif and Metz, the two recent attacks can be linked to radical Islamism (even if the media obviously speak of the psychiatric condition of the suspects).

It is still too early to qualify as terrorist the 37-year-old woman dressed in a niqab who was arrested this Sunday in the early evening at the Paris-Austerlitz train station with a knife and a Koran in an open bag.

But the whole story looks fishy…

When the police came to apprehend her, she said she lived in Seine-Saint-Denis, a heavily predominantly Muslim suburb of Paris, and she had no ID. She couldn’t explain why she had a weapon either, although she stated that she did not want to “hurt herself or others”.

On the basis of her declared identity, the law enforcement was able to verify that this woman was wanted by the judicial police and listed as a “missing person.”

Here we are, with a 37-year-old runaway, wearing gloves and a niqab.

When the police asked her to remove her full veil, she complied without incident. She was searched to make sure that she did not have an explosive belt, and her belongings were checked by a sniffing dog from an anti-terrorist unit.

It was her behavior at the station that intrigued a young man waiting in the passenger lounge.

Completely veiled, her face hidden despite the law in force since 2011 prohibiting covering in public spaces, she was going back and forth, talking to herself and watching videos on her mobile phone.

According to this witness, she was at the train station but she did not seem to intend to take the train, she never looked at the billboards, among other things, and she did not seem to be waiting for anyone either.

After observing her for about 40 minutes and noticing that she was talking out loud, with her index finger in the air, he went to the station police station and reported her.

And he probably saved lives.