‘Suicide attacker’ dies in failed plot after ramming police van
PARIS prosecutors yesterday launched a terror inquiry after a car carrying weapons “deliberately” rammed a police van on the Champs-elysées just 200 yards from the presidential palace.
The car, a white Renault Mégane, struck a blue police van in the central Parisian district at around 3.40pm local time and burst into flames. Orange smoke billowed from the vehicle as police moved in to neutralise the driver in an apparent botched suicide attack.
Inside the car, they found a Kalashnikov rifle, handguns, gun cartridges and a gas canister, a police source said.
The dead assailant, known only as Adam D, was reportedly born in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil in 1985 and was last year granted a gun licence.
According to BFMTV he was authorised to carry three guns, and had declared “another six”. Tunisian intelligence tipped off the French in 2013 about his suspected radicalism after spotting him with “people carrying weapons and walkie-talkies”.
He died in the “attempted attack”, according to Gérard Collomb, the French interior minister. “Security forces have been targeted in France once again,” he said, adding that the weapons could have blown the car up.
No one else was hurt and anti-terror police have launched an inquiry. Experts said the curious orange smoke coming from the car suggested that it contained explosive material that failed to properly blow up on contact.
Jacques Poinas, the former head of the French anti-terror co-ordination unit, told BFMTV: “It appears the explosive part didn’t work. The device was apparently ignited but didn’t go off. It could also be that the assailant was too badly injured in the collision to go through with his plan.”
The attack took place hours after a man ploughed into worshippers leaving a mosque in London, and two months after a policeman was shot and killed on the avenue, three days before the first round of France’s presidential election. A note praising Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) was found next to the body of the gunman, Karim Cheurfi.
On June 7, a hammer-wielding Algerian man was shot and wounded by police after he struck an officer on the head at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, shouting it was in revenge “for Syria”. He too had pledged allegiance to Isil.
Mr Collomb said the latest incident showed that the terror threat remained very high. He is due to present a bill at a cabinet meeting tomorrow to extend France’s state of emergency from July 15 until November 1.
A new security law “is needed” and the measure would “maintain a high security level” beyond the end of the state of emergency, he said.
France has been under a state of emergency since the November 2015 attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris.