A gunman kills a 26 year old man and wounds five people in Trappes, and Macron calls the shooting a racist terrorist attack

The shooting lasted about 15 minutes on Friday morning. Just after 10 in the morning, a man in a gray Renault Clio opened fire on a car carrying a mother and her daughter on Avenue Hector Berlioz in Trappes, a working class town west of Paris. He drove on, firing in bursts at the front of a medical center, then at a petrol station and around a square with a children’s playground, in Trappes and in neighboring La Verriere. A 26 year old man, an amateur mixed martial arts fighter from Poissy named by Le Monde as Pengo B.-W., was killed. Five people were wounded. A 12 year old girl was shot eight times, broadcaster BFM reported, and was in serious condition on Friday. Three of the wounded were reported in serious condition.

Picture is an illustration of a quiet street and playground in a Paris suburb under police investigation.

Police stopped the gunman’s car, itself riddled with bullets, within about 20 minutes. Prosecutors named the suspect as Kevin T., 39. The National Antiterrorism Prosecutor’s Office, known as PNAT, said he was armed with a Sten gun, a British submachine gun from the Second World War, that he had four previous convictions which had been automatically expunged, and that he was known to police but not to the intelligence services and was not on any list of people considered a serious threat. Prosecutors said his home had been fitted with gas canisters and electric wires connected to a timer, and a member of his immediate family was taken into custody on Friday.

PNAT has opened an investigation into murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise. The office says the exact motive has not yet been formally established. President Macron, who came to Trappes town hall on Friday evening, did not wait for that finding. “What happened today is, I am telling you, a turning point, because it is the first time we have had a terrorist act that was planned to kill our compatriots, our children, based on the colour of their skin or their religion,” he told reporters. Macron said the gunman had deliberately passed over some people because of their skin color and appearance. “These people were targeted because of their color or their presumed religion, and for no other reason,” he said, calling for unity and harmony rather than fear or anger.

Trappes mayor Ali Rabeh called the shooting racist and Islamophobic. “The people targeted today could just as easily have been my mother, my brothers or my sisters in law,” said Rabeh, whose parents came from Morocco. He asked political leaders to condemn rhetoric that, in his words, ideologically arms people capable of such acts. Marine Le Pen, whose Rassemblement National holds its party congress this weekend, condemned the shooting on X as a criminal act of a terrorist nature, aggravated by the vile motive of racism. The attack landed in the middle of a national argument over the October 17 riots, in which some politicians on the right blamed immigration for the looting, and it came hours before France put 70,000 police on the streets for a second Saturday of protests.