PARIS, 16 July — A neo-Nazi militant, believed to be deranged, was arrested in Paris yesterday after firing a rifle near President Jacques Chirac at the traditional Bastille Day parade in what his wife described as an assassination attempt.
Maxime Brunerie, 25, was standing in the crowd at the Arc de Triomphe when he produced a .22 rifle from a brown guitar-case and fired one shot before being overpowered by police and led away. He was rapidly thrown to the ground, handcuffed and led away by police responding to cries from onlookers standing opposite the Arc de Triomphe.
The would-be assassin tried to commit suicide afterward by turning the gun on himself, a French minister said.
“He fired a first shot, which was deflected, he was then overcome and he tried to turn the gun on himself,” said Patrick Devedjian, minister for local liberties.
“It wasn’t an incident, it was an attack. A man from the far right — even further right than the National Front, made an attempt on the life of the president,” the minister added.
Brunerie was in a police psychiatric unit after admitting — in what investigators called “extremely confused language” — that he had gone to the Arc de Triomphe intending to murder the president.
Police said that it was significant that he had stood amidst other spectators watching the military parade, armed only with a low-powered .22 hunting rifle. A trained assassin or terrorist would have chosen a more powerful weapon and one of the hundreds of windows or roofs overlooking the parade route down the Champs Elysees, they said.
Chirac, 69, had passed by moments before in an open-top vehicle at the start of the military march-past. It was not clear if the president was aware of the incident nor if he had been in serious danger.
“I was watching the parade. Mr. Chirac was going by in his car when I felt the crowd moving to my right. Then I saw, two or three meters away, a man aiming in the direction of the president,” said Mohamed Chelali, 50. “Someone hit the gunman’s hand and I grabbed a part of the weapon, and some metal bit of it fell off. A third person kept it pointed upward,” Chelali, a Canadian tourist, said after being interviewed by police.
Police said Brunerie — a student and part-time chauffeur from the southern Paris suburb of Evry — was “known to belong to neo-Nazi and hooligan movements.” Officials said he was a member of the far-right student group GUD and had links to skinhead groups.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Brunerie was a “militant of the extreme-right... known for his violence and with a police record.”
Asked whether there had been an attempt on her husband’s life, Chirac’s wife Bernadette said “Yes, it’s clear.”
The right-wing Chirac was re-elected head of state in May, and with his supporters now controlling Parliament he is one of the Europe’s most powerful politicians.
After the incident, the parade down the Champs Elysees continued unaffected, with Franco-American relations the central theme of the commemoration. (The Independent)
