The man who injured six people Wednesday morning at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris has been arrested for attempted murder, the Paris regional prosecutor’s office said Thursday.
The state of health of the man, who was shot by the police, was considered compatible with the measure of deprivation of liberty, explained the same source.
The detainee was hospitalized after receiving two bullet wounds to the chest and one to the arm, fired by a uniformed border policeman on duty, and another from the Ile-de-France network brigade which was off duty, but at the time the man stabbed six people at the train station.
As described by the Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, in a statement released Wednesday night, the man, in his early twenties, “began, suddenly and for no apparent reason, to injure a first victim with his weapon, after having landed about 20 blows” with a “metal hook”.
The attack injured three men, one of whom was a 46-year-old police officer, two others aged 41 and 36, and three women aged 40, 47 and 53.
The attacker’s identity is still being verified, the Paris prosecutor’s office added, explaining that the detainee is “registered under various identities in the fingerprint file.”
Still, the prosecution said the man was born in Algeria or Libya.
A police source assured, however, that it is a Libyan born in the year 2000 who had an expulsion order from France that could not be executed due to the instability that reigns in Libya.
His motives are still unknown and there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that it was a terrorist attack, according to the newspaper Le Figaro.
The incident took place on Wednesday at 6:40 a.m. in Paris (5:40 a.m. in Lisbon), when an “extremely threatening individual” launched an attack at the train station, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin explained.
Gare du Nord is the largest train station in Europe and the third largest in the world in terms of traffic, with 700,000 people a day and more than 220 million passengers a year.
The trains reach the north of France, but also international destinations such as London, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Source: TSF
