Two individuals attempted to blow up the Paris offices of Bank of America in the early hours of Saturday morning. One of them is in police custody and claims to have been recruited via Snapchat for €600. An amateur operation, yet one whose consequences could nonetheless have been severe.
According to our information, an individual was apprehended in the early hours of Friday morning, at 3:25 a.m., while attempting to detonate a homemade device outside the Bank of America offices on Rue La Boétie, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. Officers from the 8th district’s anti-crime brigade (BAC), on a security patrol in the vicinity of the bank, carried out the arrest. According to a police source, the individual was caught holding a lighter as he was attempting to ignite the device, which consisted of a transparent five-litre container filled with an unidentified liquid, likely a hydrocarbon, and a charge made up of a firecracker containing approximately 650 grams of explosive powder. The device was taken into the care of the Central Laboratory of the Paris Police Prefecture.
The suspect was not acting alone. He was accompanied by a second individual who fled the scene. During questioning, he told investigators that he had been dropped off at the location by a third person driving a vehicle, and that he had been recruited via Snapchat for a payment of €600 to carry out the operation. The bank had been under tactical camera surveillance. The man was placed in police custody. The investigation has been handed to the Paris Criminal Investigation Department, in cooperation with the DGSI (domestic intelligence service). According to our information, the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) has been called in.
This attempted attack on an American interest on French soil comes amid an extremely tense security climate. Since the launch on 28 February of the joint US-Israeli military offensive against Iran, European intelligence services have raised their alert levels in response to the risk of reprisals on European soil. Europol has warned that networks linked to Tehran could be activated to strike Western interests, whether through coordinated actions by proxies of the Iranian regime or through the initiative of local cells acting autonomously. In France, the Vigipirate plan has been maintained at its highest level — “attack emergency” — since 5 January 2026, and the Sentinelle security operation was reinforced by Emmanuel Macron on 2 March. French authorities have notably stepped up protection of American and Israeli diplomatic sites as well as Jewish places of worship, in a climate where Tehran has explicitly threatened to strike Europe should France, the United Kingdom or Germany take part in operations against Iran.
