Man injures at least 6 people at Gare du Nord train station in Paris

At least six people were injured in the French capital, Paris, after a man attacked them at the Gare du Nord train station, one of the busiest in Europe, on Wednesday morning (11).

According to information from the French Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, the man —unidentified for now— attacked them with a homemade weapon at the entrance and inside the station. Initially, the police had said that the weapon used was a knife or a blade.

The man was shot three times by plainclothes police and taken to an area hospital with serious injuries. Darmanin said he had no identity documents at the time of the attack. At least one policeman is among the injured.

Asked by reporters about possible terrorist motives, the minister said that a criminal investigation had been opened, but that so far this does not appear to be a factor involved in the episode.

Gare du Nord is the arrival station for the Eurostar line, responsible for the high-speed train that connects London, the British capital, to Paris, which makes it one of the busiest in the city. And this is not the first episode of violence recorded at the site.

In February 2022, police officers killed a man who attacked them with a knife at the station. As early as October 2017, a man who stabbed two people at Marseille train station was shot and killed by security agents.

Wednesday’s attack comes three weeks after a gunman killed three people at a Kurdish cultural center in Paris. The man, a 69-year-old Frenchman identified as William M., confessed to police his xenophobic motivation, saying he had developed a “pathological hatred of foreigners”. He is currently in custody and has been charged with murder and attempted murder with a racist motive.

France was the scene of large-scale terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016, followed by a series of smaller shooting and knife attacks in the following months. The number of episodes has declined, but officials say the threat remains real and intelligence services often thwart plans. In December, the interior minister said that at least 39 attacks by radical Islamic groups and another nine attacks by far-right groups had been thwarted since 2017 in the country.