PARIS – French police pursued a nationwide manhunt Sunday for a tall, bearded assailant who wounded a uniformed soldier in the neck with a box cutter in what authorities said was an attempted assassination.

The 23-year-old soldier was reported to be out of danger after being transported to a nearby military hospital. But the attack sent a shudder through the French capital because it recalled the gory killing of a soldier in the streets of London on Wednesday, allegedly by a pair of homegrown Muslim extremists, an act that the British government called terrorism.

District prosecutor Robert Gelli said the man was wearing a black sweater and black trousers as security cameras monitored him later fleeing into the crowd at a subway and suburban entrance plaza.

The attack took place at the La Defense business center in the suburbs, about a mile west of the Arc de Triomphe. Military patrols have been deployed for months in transit centers in French cities as part of an antiterrorism plan called Vigipirate.

French authorities have warned for months that the country was in danger of a terrorist attack in reprisal for France’s military intervention in January against Islamist jihadists in northern Mali.


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