Man in custody after Paris attack on soldiers

Police officers and emergency workers stand next to a damaged BMW car with a broken windscreen, after the police arrested a suspect on the A16 motorway, near Marquise, northern France, on Wednesday. (AFP)

LONDON: French police shot and arrested a man following a car chase in the north of the country after an attack on soldiers in a Paris suburb.
A car rammed into a group of soldiers in the northwestern suburb of Levallois-Perret on Wednesday morning, injuring six before speeding off. The area is home to France’s main intelligence service.
Armed police from elite units tracked the man for five hours after the attack before cornering him on a motorway in northern France and shooting him several times.
The suspect was unarmed when he was trapped by police some 260 km north of the capital. One policeman was injured by a stray bullet in the operation.
The daily newspaper Le Parisien named the suspect as 37-year-old Hamou B., originally from Satrouville west of Paris and said that searches had been carried out at his home and those of his associates. The Paris prosecutor’s office declined to comment.
Authorities said it bore the hallmarks of a terror attack. The driver appeared to have waited for the soldiers in the the affluent area where France’s domestic counter-terrorism agency is located.
Several dozen troops from Operation Sentinel, launched in the wake of Islamist attacks in Paris in early 2015, are based there.
France’s Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly said the attack was proof there remained an active threat and that the 7,000-strong Sentinel force “was more necessary than ever”.
Three soldiers had minor injuries, Parly said, while three others were more gravely hurt but not as seriously as previously thought.
Patrick Balkany, mayor of Levallois-Perret, told broadcaster BFM TV that it was a “disgusting” act of aggression that was “without any doubt” premeditated. “It all happened very quickly,” he said. “It hurtled at them.”
Jean-Claude Veillant, resident of an apartment building directly above the scene, witnessed part of the attack.
“I heard a loud noise, the sound of scraping metal. Shortly after, I saw one of the badly wounded lying in front of the Vigipirate (army patrol) vehicle and another one behind it receiving treatment,” he told reporters.
More than 230 people have been killed in terror attacks in France, including one attack on Paris and another on the Riviera city of Nice, over the past two years with the capital on maximum alert.
Speaking to Arab News, Raffaello Pantucci, the director for International Security Studies at the Institute for Defense and Security Studies, said there was a myriad of things France could do to prevent these supposed ‘lone wolf’ attacks, but that it would always be tough when faced with a determined attacker.
“Although it’s too soon to talk specifically about this attack, most of the time it’s not a lone wolf, you find the attacker has links to people and there are connections to people who will likely have been investigated in the past,” Pantucci told Arab News.
“So agencies will often have a lot of information in front of them and it’s about linking that information and understanding it.”
With the recent attacks being low tech, where the attackers used everyday items such as knives and cars, Pantucci said among the practical things government and security forces could do was issue more knife vests and erect more bollards in towns and cities.
However longer term solutions are more challenging.
“Radicalism differs from person to person so you have to try combat it at the micro level,” Pantucci added.
“You have to look at specific suburbs to find out the reasons for radicalization — it could be a poor school, a particular preacher, higher levels of deprivation et cetera. You have to focus on those issues and then you might see a change at the macro level.”
More worryingly he claimed the more attacks there are, the more others may be inspired to emulate them.
“France has been a major target for a while now. It has a big radicalized community and its relationship to the battlefield in Syria seems to be different from other countries’.
“Also there have been successful big attacks there before and that has an inspiring effect on those looking to commit these atrocities.”