PARIS, July 16, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - A man was arrested Monday over the stabbing of an on-duty soldier in Paris, with the suspect known to police for a 2018 murder that saw him sent to a psychiatric unit.

The attack at the Gare de l'Est station in northern Paris came less than two weeks before the start of the Olympic Games in the French capital.

The soldier's life was not in danger, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on social media platform X, while a police source told AFP he had suffered a knife wound "between the shoulder blades".

The 40-year-old suspect was arrested by other soldiers on patrol while the wounded man was taken to hospital "conscious", the source said.

A security perimeter was erected on one side of the station in the wake of the stabbing, an AFP journalist said, with police still present around midnight (2200 GMT) some two hours after the incident.

The public prosecutor in Paris has opened an investigation into attempted murder, which it said would seek to establish "the circumstances and the motivation".

The suspect is a 40-year-old born in the Democratic Republic of Congo who obtained French nationality in 2006, a police source said.

He "said he is Christian and shouted 'God is great' in French" at the moment of the attack, another police source added.

The suspect said he attacked the soldier "because the military kills people in his country", the second source said.

The man was known to authorities in France over a 2018 murder that saw him detained in a psychiatric facility, two police sources told AFP.

He fatally stabbed a 22-year-old man at the Chatelet-les-Halles metro station in central Paris.

He was declared not legally responsible for the murder due to diminished responsibility and was never tried, according to a court judgment verified by AFP.

"Thoughts to the soldier injured tonight at the Gare de l'Est," Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu wrote on X, paying tribute to the French troops protecting citizens.

He said the soldier was part of a special military operation to protect sensitive sites in Paris that was deployed following the 2015 Islamist attacks on the satirical Charlie Hebdo newspaper.

There have since been multiple attacks against the armed forces in the French capital, including at least four in 2017.