Paris hit by ‘terror’ attack as car mows down soldiers
Three infantrymen remain in hospital with serious injuries after BMW ploughs into them
FRENCH police shot and arrested a man suspected of mowing down six soldiers near Paris yesterday after pursuing him down a motorway.
Le Parisien newspaper named the driver in the suspected terror incident as Hamou B, a 37-yearold from Sartrouville in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. He is in hospital with serious injuries. At least 300 police were mobilised in the manhunt, after what police said was a “complex and dangerous intervention”.
One police officer is understood to have been hit by a stray bullet. The arrest, made on the A16 motorway in the northern town of Marquise, came after a driver of a BMW mowed down six French soldiers in Levallois-perret, an upmarket suburb to the northwest of Paris. France’s counter-terror unit took over the case late in the morning.
“A suspect has been detained and police are carrying out a raid at his home,” a police spokesman told The Daily Telegraph.
Edouard Philippe, the prime minister, confirmed that the suspect was driving the same car that had hit the soldiers, but stopped short of saying whether the arrested man is believed to have been behind the attack. The man was reported to be unarmed when arrested. Gerard Collomb, the interior minister, said the attack had been carried out by “a man on his own”, adding that it was deliberate.
He confirmed that the threat in France “remains extremely elevated”. “This is the eighth attack against our security forces since January 2015,” he said. Mr Collomb visited the in- jured soldiers in hospital yesterday afternoon. The incident occurred at around 8am local time after a BMW rammed a group of soldiers who were stepping out of the barracks.
Witnesses said the car was parked, apparently in wait, on a small road not far from the town hall.
“I heard a huge crash, which I thought was the sound of scaffolding being put up,” Thierry Chappe, a resident in a building opposite the crime scene, told AFP.
Six soldiers were taken to a military hospital to the southwest of Paris after the hit-and-run.
Three of them are said to have sustained serious but not life-threatening injuries. The other three have been released from hospital with minor injuries.
The soldiers, from the 35th infantry
‘I heard a huge crash, which I thought was the sound of scaffolding being put up’
regiment, were taken by surprise in the attack and reportedly unable to give clear details about exactly what happened. They were in the middle of a changing of the guards at the time.
Patrick Balkany, the local mayor, immediately told the French press that the incident was “without a doubt a deliberate act”.
He said the driver had been waiting for the soldiers to report for duty, then “accelerated very quickly the moment they came out”.
Florence Parly, the defence minister, said the incident was a “cowardly act”, adding that “it did nothing to dent soldiers’ determination to work for the security of the French people”.
Mr Collomb shared his support for the soldiers via his Twitter account, and paid his respect to the 7,000 soldiers working for Operation Sentinelle, which was brought in as part of France’s state of emergency, launched after the January 2015 terror attacks in Paris.
It came just four days after Sentinelle soldiers arrested an 18-year-old with a history of psychological problems at the Eiffel Tower, in which he had brandished a knife and shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is Greatest).
He told investigators he wanted to kill a soldier, sources close to the case told AFP.
Levallois-perret is about 5km (three miles) from tourist landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Elysee Presidential Palace.
More than 230 people have been killed in Islamist attacks on French soil since January 2015, including attacks on Paris and on the Riviera city of Nice.