At least one person was killed and four others injured in a shooting near Paris that may have been motivated by Islamophobic hatred, French officials say.
French President Emmanuel Macron called the shooting a racist terrorist attack, saying people were targeted because of their religion and the color of their skin.
“Investigations are ongoing, but it is clearly a terrorist crime. It is an extremely serious act,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told reporters from Yvelines, about 30 kilometers west of Paris, where the attack took place.
Authorities said the 39-year-old suspect, who was not named, drove through the town of Trappes, where he fired an automatic weapon at a gas station, a medical center and a children’s playground.
Ali Rabeh, the mayor of Trappes, declared that it was “objectively a racist attack, probably Islamophobic”. The official, whose parents are from Morocco, added: “The people targeted today could just as easily have been my mother, my brothers or my sisters-in-law. »
One person was arrested and charged with four counts, including murder and possession of a firearm, with the “aggravating circumstance that the acts were committed on the basis of real or supposed membership of a specific race, ethnicity, alleged race, ethnic group, nation or religion,” the French anti-terrorism prosecution said in a statement.
One of the injured people was a 12-year-old girl, Rabeh told French broadcaster BFM TV. BFM said the injured girl had been hit eight times and was in serious condition.
This is a developing story. Please check again for updates.
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