The suspect had also booby-trapped his apartment in Plaisir with three gas canisters and wires connected to a timer, located a few kilometers from the towns of Trappes and La Verrière where the attack occurred, according to the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), which quickly took up the case.
The building where he lives had been evacuated and his neighborhood cordoned off in the afternoon, an AFP journalist observed.
The man was arrested and placed in custody, as was a member of his immediate family, PNAT announced.
The Élysée Palace denounced a “racist terrorist attack,” prompting President Macron to travel to Trappes in the early evening to express “his solidarity with all those involved.” He notably met the public prosecutor and residents.
According to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, who had visited this working-class town southwest of Paris earlier in the day, one person was killed and five seriously injured. Among the injured is a 12-year-old girl.
PNAT announced it had opened an investigation for “murder in relation to a terrorist enterprise, with the circumstance that the acts were committed on account of the real or presumed belonging to a supposed race, an ethnicity, a nation or a religion determined.”
The attack was “objectively a terrorist act, with racist overtones, probably islamophobic,” judged Friday afternoon the mayor of Trappes, Ali Rabeh, after speaking with the Interior Minister.
“Shock”
“This is probably one of the first, a first attempt at a mass crime with islamophobic and racist connotations,” said the mayor.
On BFMTV, he indicated that among the victims, “the person who died is of African origin and the person in critical condition is of Maghrebi origin,” evoking the shooter’s presumed intention to cause a “carnage.”
Laurent Nuñez, accompanied in Trappes by the minister tasked with fighting discrimination, Aurore Bergé, denounced a “terrorist crime” and “an extremely grave act.”
After firing bursts from a car, the 39-year-old suspect was arrested in Coignières (Yvelines), according to a police source, indicating that the events occurred around 10:30 a.m.
He was arrested in possession of a submachine gun, tear gas grenades, and is listed in the Criminal Records Processing file (TAJ), but is unknown to the territorial intelligence, according to the source.
In La Verrière, mayor Nicolas Dainville told AFP that a 12-year-old girl had been seriously wounded by eight gunshot impacts, but her condition was now “stable.”
He added that two cleaners, “of African descent,” had been injured while they were cleaning a school by the suspect, who would have “exited his vehicle to shoot.”
“It’s shock, trauma, a nightmare,” he told AFP.
“De-escalation”
Samy, a Trappes resident, saw a body lying on the ground from his window.
His mother, he told AFP, was in the street and saw a gray Clio car “screaming by” and heard “gunshots.”
“Clearly, right there, my heart is broken and what drives me is fear,” testified another resident, Adel, a 50-year-old man of Maghrebi origin. “Simply because the victims’ profiles (…) are those of people who are racialized.”
A psychological support unit has been set up.
“We are collectively responsible for what just happened and for what could happen again in our country,” said Ali Rabeh.
Six months before the presidential election, the mayor of Trappes estimated that “our responsibility to everyone is de-escalation, the republican harmony.”
