PARIS -French anti-terror investigators on Sunday probed the stabbing of a soldier in Paris in an attack that echoed the grisly killing of another soldier in London, where British police were holding three new suspects.
French soldier Cedric Cordier was in hospital in a stable condition after the Saturday stabbing in a busy underground shopping and transport hub where he had been on patrol with two colleagues.
French President Francois Hollande said the stabbing could not be linked to the London murder "at this stage", although his interior minister, Manuel Valls, said the "sudden violence of the attack" was similar.
The assault on another soldier three days after Afghanistan veteran Drummer Lee Rigby was hacked to death on a London street in an attack will raise fears of a spiral of brazen violence against Western soldiers on their home soil.
In Britain, three men were arrested Saturday on suspicion of conspiracy to murder Rigby.
Two men aged 28 an 24 were arrested at a home in southeast London. Police fired a Taser electric stun gun on the older suspect, and on a 21-year-old man they arrested in a street around a mile from the murder scene.
All three are being held by detectives from the Counter Terrorism Command supported by specialist firearms officers. Officers also searched four residential addresses in southeast London.
The two men suspected of murdering Rigby, 28-year-old Michael Adebolajo and 22-year-old Michael Adebowale, remain in a stable condition under armed guard in separate hospitals after being shot by police at the scene of the killing.
After the killing, the pair launched into an tirade against British military involvement in Muslim countries, captured on film by a passerby whose footage of Adebolajo, hands bloody and wielding a knife and meat cleaver, shocked the nation.
Meanwhile, it emerged on Sunday that one of the main suspects in the brutal murder of a soldier in Britain was arrested in Kenya three years ago and questioned over alleged links to a group of insurgents.
The Kenyan government confirmed that Michael Adebolajo was detained in 2010 under a false name and handed over to British intelligence agents. "He was arrested under a different name, a fake name," government spokesman Muthui Kariuki told AFP. "We did not process him, he was handed over to the local MI5." A Kenyan anti-terrorism police officer said Adebolajo was arrested and questioned over links to the Shebab insurgents.
The Shebab are an Al-Qaeda linked group fighting in Somalia, but with ties in neighbouring nations including Kenya's Indian Ocean coastal region.