A 30-year-old Sudanese national was arrested in Paris on Thursday for attempting to push a woman onto the train tracks at Châtelet-les-Halles station. The incident is the latest in a long line of similar attacks on Western Europe’s public transport systems that are disproportionately committed by foreigners.
The victim, a 23-year-old woman from Massy, was suddenly and violently struck in the calf at around 3:10 p.m. while waiting for her train on the RER D platform. According to Le Parisien, the force of the blow sent her crashing to the ground just one meter from the platform’s edge as a train approached. Her attacker walked away calmly as though nothing had happened.
The woman managed to board the same train as her attacker and reported the assault to transport police officials. Upon arrival at Boussy-Saint-Antoine station in Essonne, officers arrested the suspect and took him into custody at Montgeron police station.
The man, who is in France illegally and unknown to police records, is now under investigation for attempted murder. Authorities are expected to review security footage from Châtelet-les-Halles and conduct a psychiatric evaluation.
This attack comes amid increasing concern over the disproportionate role of foreign nationals in violent crimes on public transport. According to a 2023 report by the SSMSI, the statistical bureau of France’s Interior Ministry, 69 percent of violent robberies, assaults, and sexual attacks in the Île-de-France transport network in 2022 were committed by foreign nationals.
Remix News analyzed this data at the time and found that African migrants were responsible for 52 percent of these crimes, despite making up just 3.2 percent of France’s population.
The attack today is almost identical to an incident in July 2023 when a 40-year-old Guinean migrant pushed a 52-year-old woman onto the tracks at the RER B Cité Universitaire station, resulting in her death. Across Western Europe, similar crimes have been recorded, fueling public debate on immigration and security.
In Germany, there have been multiple cases of migrants attempting to push strangers onto train tracks. In May 2021, a 30-year-old Afghan was charged with trying to drag a 12-year-old child in front of a moving freight train in Schwerin. In 2022, an Eritrean migrant pushed a woman and her child onto the tracks at Frankfurt Central Station. The child was struck and killed, while the mother barely escaped. The perpetrator avoided prison due to psychiatric issues.
More recently, in March 2023, a 33-year-old Algerian and a 31-year-old Tunisian were arrested for pushing a 49-year-old man onto the train tracks at Pforzheim station in Germany after he refused to give them a cigarette. Just two months earlier, a 27-year-old Syrian national was arrested for throwing a teenage girl onto the tracks in North Rhine-Westphalia.
This violent trend has extended into the Netherlands, where a viral video in 2023 showed a group of young men kicking, punching, and pushing a lone male victim onto the tracks at Amsterdam’s Bijlmer ArenA station. Dutch politician Geert Wilders called it an example of the country’s “multicultural hell.”
Even in Denmark, a 29-year-old Afghan migrant pushed a 19-year-old woman he had never met onto the train tracks at Nørreport Station in Copenhagen on Dec. 29, 2023. He later admitted, “I did it to kill her,” and pleaded guilty to attempted murder.
Western Europe’s public transport networks are increasingly becoming sites of violent crime, with foreign nationals disproportionately involved.
In Germany, Deutsche Bahn reported a dramatic rise in railway violence in 2024, with 10,600 cases of physical injury recorded at train stations from January through October — already surpassing the total number for all of 2023.
Officials warned of a “continually decreasing inhibition threshold for violence” as they vowed to ramp up security measures to combat the rise in such incidents.