Girl, 12, killed; eight wounded as car rams into Paris pizzeria

 

PARIS: A car ploughed into the outdoor terrace of a pizzeria in the town of Sept-Sorts – located on the city's east side – early Tuesday night, killing a 12-year-old girl and injuring several other people, a French Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The vehicle wounded at least eight others, BFM TV said, adding that the driver has subsequently been detained.

Initially, it was not clear whether the incident was terrorism-related or not; however, the Interior Ministry spokesman said the driver had been arrested and the early indications were that this was not an act of terrorism.

"I cannot tell you that terrorism has been discounted, but it is not the leading line of inquiry at this point. The first indications don't point toward terrorism," Pierre-Henry Brandet – the spokesman – told BFM TV.

Brandet described the man as "depressive", noting that he was about 30 years old.

Officers from the national gendarmerie put up a security cordon around the scene and urged the public not to hinder their operation. A local official from the Seine-et-Marne prefecture, however, declined to comment.

Investigators believe the act was "deliberate… but apparently, has no connection with a terrorist act," the public prosecutor's office in the town of Meaux said.

A photograph published on social media showed a grey BMW car surrounded by upturned tables in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the image.

String of terror-related attacks

France has suffered a string of terror-related attacks, including the use of cars as weapons.

The latest incident occurred less than a week after an Algerian national was arrested – on August 9 – on suspicion of deliberately ramming a hired BMW into a group of soldiers on a patrol in Levallois-Perret, a western Paris suburb, injuring six of them.

The soldiers were part of Operation Sentinel, launched in the wake of militant attacks in Paris in early 2015. The Levallois-Perret attack was the 15th on troops and police in the last two-and-a-half years, many of them Daesh-inspired.

The suspect, a 36-year-old Algerian man, was later shot and wounded after a dramatic motorway chase.

—An earlier version of this story gave the dead girl's age as eight; it has now been corrected to 12.