Suspect in attack in Levallois-Perret on Wednesday named as Hamou Bachir Benlatreche, an Algerian national unknown to French security services

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

French police are waiting to interview the man suspected of ploughing a car into a group of soldiers as he recovers from wounds after being shot during his arrest.

The suspect has been named as Hamou Bachir Benlatreche, a 36-year-old Algerian national, legally resident in France and unknown to the security services. He is in a serious condition in hospital after he was shot while being apprehended on a motorway in northern France.

Benlatreche was driving the rented black BMW car used in the attack in Levallois-Perret, on the outskirts of Paris.

Detectives, who have linked the car but not the driver to the incident that left three soldiers seriously injured, have been searching his home in a north-west suburb of the French capital to establish a possible motive for the attack.



A police source told Le Figaro the suspect had a stable and legitimate job and appeared to be “perfectly unknown”. “He doesn’t appear to have been in any Islamist shadows,” a source told the paper.

A police officer told Agence France-Presse the suspect, who was shot five times after ramming a police vehicle trying to force him to stop, was still in hospital in Lille and not able to be questioned as yet.

Mohammed Benlatreche, the suspect’s uncle, said he did not recognise the photograph of his nephew with a long beard in the media, and insisted he had never shown any inclination toward or support for terrorism.

“He works hard, he gets up early to deliver things to stores. Then he was a taxi driver with Uber. It’s hardly believable it’s him they are talking about,” he said.

“I was astonished when I saw the picture on the television. I’ve never seen him with a beard. Never. He was always shaved. He attended prayers like any Muslim. You could have knocked me over,” Benlatreche told BFMTV.

He added his nephew had never shown the slightest extremist view. “Not to me, he didn’t.”

A trainee police officer was hailed as the hero of the hour on Thursday for spotting the suspect’s car as it sped north from Paris after the attack.

French police search home of man suspected of driving into soldiers Read more

The officer, named only as Laurent, aged 29, was driving to work when the black BMW roared up behind him as he joined the motorway.

“He was going so fast, I had to move over an let him go,” Laurent told French journalists. “The windscreen was shattered, the bumper was dragging on the ground and the grill was dented.”

Thinking the driver was fleeing the scene of a road accident, the police officer made a mental note of the car’s registration number.

Colleagues praised the young officer’s quick reaction, which enabled them to identify and track the suspect vehicle.

The latest attack, the sixth on France’s security services in less than two years, has brought criticism over the continuation of Operation Sentinelle, introduced following the attacks in Paris in January 2015 and expanded as part of a national state of emergency after the series of bombings and shootings in the French capital in November that year.

Between 7,000 and 10,000 soldiers along with several thousand gendarmes and police have been patrolling France since the attacks, half of them in and around Paris.



A young soldier told Le Monde that many of his colleagues had signed up to see action rather than domestic duties. “When they told us Operation Sentinelle would last for some time, there was a wave of people leaving the regiment,” he said.

Gen Jean-Pierre Bosser, chief of staff of the French army, told the country’s defence committee last month: “Our young people are signing up for action and to see the world. When they’re told their first mission will be Sentinelle at the Gare du Nord, it’s not what they dreamed of … their main reason for joining is to go to Mali or other foreign theatres of operation.”

Georges Fenech, shadow justice minister, said: “Soldiers take part in war in foreign countries. That’s their role. We need to disengage them from Operation Sentinelle.”