Arshad Mahmoud, the father of the attacker who stabbed and injured two people outside the old offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week, says he is proud of his son’s actions.

Pakistan-born Zaheer Hassan Mahmood had admitted to the attack, saying it was in response to the magazine’s re-publication of “blasphemous” sketches of the Prophet of Islam.

His father, Arshad Mahmood, a farmer in Pakistan, told AFP: “I think what he (Zaheer) did was very good.

The recent re-publication of sketches of the Prophet of Islam by Charlie Hebdo at the start of the trial for the 2015 attack on the magazine has drawn condemnation throughout the Islamic world and protests in Pakistan.

Zaheer Mahmood has been charged with ‘attempted murder in a terrorist plot’ after the Paris attacks, but his family and neighbors in his small village of Kothali Qazi in Punjab Province have accused him of being a defender of the Islamic faith.