Twelve people injured in incident described by Emmanuel Macron as an attack

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Police in France were hunting a suspect following a blast in a pedestrian street in the heart of Lyon that wounded more than a dozen people just two days before the country’s fiercely contested European parliament elections.

The president, Emmanuel Macron, called Friday’s explosion, apparently from a package packed with shrapnel and placed in the street, an “attack” and sent his interior minister, Christophe Castaner, to Lyon.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A frame grab from a surveillance video showing a man pushing a mountain bike in the vicinity of a suspect package bomb blast in Lyon. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Police issued an appeal for witnesses on Twitter as they sought the suspect, a man believed to be in his early 30s on a mountain bicycle caught on security cameras in the area immediately before the explosion.

They posted an image of the man, wearing light-coloured shorts and a longsleeved dark top and described him as “dangerous”.

The country’s justice minister, Nicole Belloubet, told BFM television it was too soon to say whether the blast was a “terrorist act”.

A police source said the package contained “screws or bolts” and had been placed in front of a bakery.

The number of injured stood at 13 people, with 11 taken to hospitals. None of the injuries was life-threatening.

Macron said: “It’s not for me to give a toll, but it appears there are no casualties. There have been injuries, so obviously I’m thinking of these injured and their families.”

Denis Broliquier, the mayor of the city’s second arrondissement, said: “An eight-year-old girl was wounded … We’re fairly relieved because apparently there were no serious injuries but, on the other hand, we are certain it was an explosive device.”

Play Video 0:39 Lyon bombing described by Emmanuel Macron as an 'attack' - video

“There was an explosion and I thought it was a car crash,” said Eva, a 17-year-old student who was about 15 metres (50 feet) from the site of the blast. “There were bits of electric wire near me and batteries and bits of cardboard and plastic. The windows were blown out.”

A terrorism investigation has been opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which has jurisdiction over all terror cases in the country.

France has been on high alert following a wave of deadly terror attacks since 2015 that have killed more than 250 people.