One policeman has been killed and two wounded in a shooting incident in central Paris, days before the first round of the French presidential election.
Pierre-Henry Brandet, of the French interior ministry, said the attacker opened fire on a police van on the Champs Élysées on Thursday night, killing one officer and seriously wounding two others. He said later that the wounded police officers’ lives were no longer in danger.
At about 9pm the man drove a car up to a parked police van full of officers. He got out of the car and fired an automatic weapon, killing one officer in the van, before shooting at others who were standing on the nearby pavement, injuring two before he was shot dead by police.
The French president, François Hollande, said the Champs Élysées attack was “terrorist in nature” and promised “utmost vigilance” by security services to ensure security around the presidential election. He has called a defence council meeting for 8am on Friday.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement by the jihadi group’s propaganda agency Amaq. According to AFP, the statement said the attacker was one of the group’s “fighters” known as Abu Yussef, “the Belgian”. The statement offered no evidence to support the claim.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor François Molins said that security officials had verified the attacker’s identity, although he did not release the name. Molins said that investigators were trying to determine whether the attacker had any accomplices.
Citing sources close to the inquiry, AFP said he was a 39-year-old who had been under investigation by anti-terrorist officers for having shown an intention to kill police. A police search was carried out at a home in Seine-et-Marne outside Paris.
AFP, Le Parisien and other news outlets reported that the attacker had been jailed in 2005 for the attempted murder of three police officers.
Authorities closed the Champs Élysées and the surrounding streets and called on the public to avoid the area, as a police helicopter flew low over central Paris.
A police source told AFP a tourist had been “slightly injured” by a shard of bullet that struck her knee during the shooting.
Choukri Chouanine, the owner of a restaurant on the nearby rue de Ponthieu, told AFP that he had heard a short round of “a lot of gunfire”. “We had to hide our diners in the basement,” he said.
A witness who did not want to give his name said he had been 10 metres from the shooting. “We heard shots like a firecracker and we saw an attack on police, we turned and fled.”
One woman said there had been “panic” at Franklin D Roosevelt metro station nearby. “People were running in all directions.”
A witness identified only as Inès told French television station BFM that she heard shooting and saw a man’s body on the ground, and that the area was quickly evacuated by police.
The shooting was said to have happened in the area near the Marks & Spencer shop on the Champs Élysées.
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The US president, Donald Trump, reacted to the news during a joint press conference with the Italian prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, at the White House. “First of all, our condolences from our country to the people of France,” he said. “Again, it’s happening, it seems. I just saw it as I was walking in, so that’s a terrible thing.
“It’s a very, very terrible thing that’s going on in the world today. But it looks like another terrorist attack and what can you say? It just never ends. We have to be strong and we have to be vigilant and I’ve been saying it for a long time.”
The incident comes days before the first round of the French presidential election. Security had already been stepped up at political rallies this week after the arrest of two men on Tuesday suspected of plotting an “imminent and violent attack” in the run-up to Sunday’s vote.
There was no information on whether or not the Paris incident was linked in any way to the arrests earlier this week.
Officials said the men who had been arrested on Tuesday were seeking to “have an impact in this [electoral] period” and had amassed an arsenal of weapons and bomb-making equipment, including 3kg of homemade explosive found in the flat where they were staying.
On Wednesday, the Paris anti-terror court had opened a preliminary investigation into one of the suspects, Mahiedine Merabet, 29, on 5 April, after receiving a tip-off from British intelligence that he had tried to make contact with Isis in order to send them a video expressing his support for the terrorist group.
