Blast spatters glass on French street
LYON, France — A “low force” blast hit a busy pedestrian street Friday in Lyon, injuring seven people as it shattered the glass from a shop cooler, an official said.
Denis Broliquier, mayor of Lyon’s second district, told BFMTV he arrived minutes after the 5:30 p.m. explosion at the bakery chain Brioche Doree in an area that lies between the Rhone and Saone rivers, which run through France’s third-largest city.
“What I saw was a refrigerated cooler in the Brioche Doree, whose windows had been shattered. It was the windows … that superficially injured the people who were 1, 2 or 3 [yards] away,” Broliquier said.
“But the fridge itself wasn’t that damaged, which means the device had low force,” Broliquier said, downplaying the incident. “It’s not the apocalypse. … There’s no danger. There’s no risk.”
French media quoted Broliquier as saying that an image of the man who deposited a sack or suitcase that apparently exploded was captured by surveillance cameras.
France’s anti-terrorist office said it has opened an inquiry into the blast and said the anti-terrorism prosecutor, Remy Heitz, was heading to Lyon. France is jittery over a spate of attacks in recent years, some of them deadly, carried out by people ranging from trained extremist attackers to mentally unstable people.
President Emmanuel Macron called it an “attack” during a live interview about the European Parliament elections that run through Sunday.