(Paris) Two people died after being hit by gunfire on Friday shortly before noon, in Xe district of Paris, and a man arrested and placed in custody, said the prosecution.
The facts took place on rue d’Enghien, near a Kurdish cultural center, in a bustling shopping district that is particularly popular with the Kurdish community.
An investigation was opened on counts of assassination, intentional homicides and aggravated violence. The research has for the time being entrusted to the criminal brigade with the 2e DYP. The provisional report shows two dead and four injured, two of them in absolute emergency, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
A man aged 60 to 70 was arrested and taken into custody. “His identity is being made more reliable,” according to the same source.
The man arrested, “of Caucasian type”, “would be around sixty years old”, according to a police source, specifying that the toll of the victims is not definitive.
“The author is arrested with his weapon, the danger is averted, his motives are for the moment unknown”, she continued.
At the intersection of rue d’Enghien and rue d’Hauteville, stretchers were calmly brought to the scene of the shooting and a security perimeter was set up by the police, noted an AFP journalist. .
“Total Panic”
“Seven to eight shots in the street, it’s total panic, we stayed locked inside,” testified to AFP a shopkeeper from a neighboring building wishing to remain anonymous.
“We saw an old white gentleman come in and shoot in the Kurdish cultural center, then he went to the hair salon next door. We are refugees in the restaurant with the employees, ”testified Romain, the deputy director of the restaurant Pouliche Paris, in the street, reached by telephone.
According to another witness, a resident of the neighborhood who was passing in the street and interviewed by AFP, “there were people in panic who were shouting at the police: ‘he’s there, he’s there, come on’, pointing to a living room hairstyle”. “I saw the police enter the living room where there were two people on the ground, injured in the legs, I saw the blood”, he added, describing “people in shock and in panic”.
The Ahmet Kaya Center, named in homage to the eponymous singer, is a 1901 law-type association whose objective is to “promote the gradual integration” of the Kurdish population living in Île-de-France.