Paris attack: Man shot in hunt for BMW driver who mowed down six French soldiers

French police shot and arrested a suspect in the ramming of six soldiers near Paris on Wednesday after a dramatic car chase.

Le Parisien newspaper named the driver in the suspected terror incident as Hamou B, a 37-year-old from Sartrouville in the north western suburbs of Paris.

At least 300 police were mobilised in the manhunt, which ended on a motorway in northern France, 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 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 spokesperson at the Paris police told The Telegraph.

France’s Prime Minister Edouard Philippe 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.

France’s Interior Minister Gérard Collomb said the attack had been carried out by “a man on his own”, adding that it was deliberate.

He added that the threat in France “remains extremely elevated”.

“This is the eighth attack against our security forces since January 2015,” he added.

Mr Collomb visited the wounded soldiers in hospital on Wednesday afternoon.

The incident occurred at around 9am local time after a BMW crashed into a group of soldiers who were coming 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 south west 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 regiment, were taken by surprise in the collision 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.

Local Mayor Patrick Balkany 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”.

Defence Minister Florence Early said the incident marked 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 the Operation Sentinelle, which was brought in as part of France’s state of emergency that was 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.

Source: CNN