Racist Shooting Rampage Near Paris: One Dead and Five Wounded

A gunman killed one person and injured five others in northern France on Friday in an attack that authorities have labelled racially motivated and terrorist. Among the wounded is a 12-year-old girl who was seriously hurt.

The shooting began at about 10:30am local time (08:30 GMT). According to the account of events, the attacker drove through Trappes and La Verriere, working-class communities on the outskirts of Paris with large immigrant and Muslim populations. He fired an automatic weapon at a petrol station, a medical centre and a children's playground. The rampage lasted roughly 15 minutes before police arrested the suspect, a 39-year-old identified as Kevin T.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said investigations were continuing but that it was 'clearly a terrorist crime'. Prosecutors are examining whether the suspect conspired with a 'terrorist group', and a member of his immediate family circle has also been taken into custody. A local police chief told French media that investigators found an older-style semiautomatic weapon from the World War II era in the suspect's car, along with tear gas grenades.

French media reported that the dead man was young and Black, and that the wounded included a woman in a headscarf and the girl, who was also wearing a headscarf. The victim who died was named as Pengo Bassio Wangi. The girl's mother said her daughter, who is of North African descent, was shot eight times and was moved to a children's hospital for surgery. Prosecutors said three of the five injured people are in critical condition.

The attack comes as cost-of-living and student protests, often violent, grip the country. Authorities plan to deploy 70,000 police officers on Saturday, when more demonstrations are expected. Some far-right voices have blamed Muslim youths for the unrest.

Far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen condemned the shooting as 'barbaric'. Muslim groups, however, accused the populist right of fostering hatred through Islamophobic rhetoric, pointing to Le Pen's proposal, as she campaigns for the presidency, to fine women who wear the headscarf in public. Rabeh said politicians who make negative comments about Muslims are 'criminals', while the French Muslim Council blamed promoters of anti-Muslim hate speech who it said have 'blood on their hands'.