Eiffel Tower. Photo: wiki commons.

An Israeli man has died after jumping off the Eiffel tower in an apparent suicide attempt in Paris on Sunday.

According to the UK’s Daily Telegraph, at around 10:20pm, a 25-year-old Israeli man who French officials initially thought to be British as he was speaking English, began climbing with his backpack, alongside the tower’s exterior. The man had reached the third level of the tower at 906 feet (276 meters) when rescue climbers arrived on scene.

The area was quickly evacuated and negotiations between the young man, a medical expert and Paris’s elite squad of firemen ensued. For ninety minutes, the man rarely spoke, mostly listened to his headphones, uttering only a few words. The intervention was unsuccessful.

“Then he turned around and jumped,” said General Frédéric Grosjean of the BSSP, the Paris firemen rescue brigade, describing the tragedy. “He did a kind of artistic, swallow dive, projecting himself some 3 meters off the tower.”

“It was not an accidental fall,” confirmed the Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre according to a report by Israel National News.

The deceased man was born in Israel and possessed an Israeli passport, though his status in France was not revealed to reporters.