Police say attacks by man with knife and iron bar do not appear to be terrorism

A man wielding a knife and an iron bar has attacked seven people including two British tourists in Paris.

Police arrested a suspect, whom they believed to be an Afghan national aged 31, after a group of pétanque players chased him and reportedly brought him to the ground.

Officers said the attacks on Sunday evening did not appear to be terrorism-related.

Four of the wounded were in a serious condition in hospital, one of them critical. Le Parisien newspaper said the attacker stabbed one of the British tourists in the chest and the other in the head. The Foreign Office said it was investigating the incident.

The attacks occurred at about 10.45pm (21.45 BST) on Sunday near a cinema on the popular Canal de l’Ourcq at Villette, in the 19th arrondissement of the French capital.

Police said the man attacked passersby at random. “At this stage, nothing leads us to believe these attacks are of a terrorist nature,” a police source said.

The man was reportedly unknown to the police and was not on France’s Fiche-S list of potential terrorism suspects.

One witness told BFMTV: “We saw people on the ground. We saw blood. There was a man who was running around with a knife of 40cm long. The whole thing happened quickly: it was all over in about seven minutes.”

A security guard at one of two cinemas on either side of the canal said he saw a man who had assaulted people being chased by two men who tried to stop him. “He had an iron bar in his hand which he threw at the men chasing him, then he took out a knife,” the guard said.

Another witness, Youssef Najah, 38, said he was walking along the canal near a bowling green when he saw a man running and holding a knife.

“There were around 20 people chasing him. They started throwing pétanque balls at him,” he said. “Around four or five balls hit him in the head, but they weren’t able to stop him.”

Najah said the attacker dived into an alleyway where he “tried to hide behind two British tourists. We said to them: ‘Watch out, he has a knife.’ But they didn’t react.” The pair were then attacked, he said.

One of the men who caught the suspect said he had been having a drink in the MK2 cinema cafe when he saw the man strike.

“I didn’t understand at first, then he headed for the swimming pool on the canal and there he began to hit people with the iron bar,” the witness, named only as Smaïn, told Le Parisien.

“Afterwards he stabbed someone. There were three or four youngsters who were playing pétanque and they followed him with their boules. Then began targeting him with the boules to keep him away.”

Smaïn said he, the boules players and four other people eventually surrounded the attacker.

“I had a stick, another had an iron bar … one of us hit him. He was threatening everyone with his knife. After he was hit several times he lost his balance and I hit the hand in which he was holding the knife. I then jumped on him and got him to the ground and got him to drop his weapon.”

He said the suspect said nothing after he was caught. “People were asking him ‘why did you do that?’ but he didn’t answer. Even when he was attacking he didn’t say a word.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Evidence is marked on the pavement in Paris. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

One of the victims of the attack said the man hit her over the head with an iron bar. The 44-year-old woman, named only as Juliette, who spent the night in hospital, said: “We were having a picnic on the Quai de la Loire facing the cinema when I heard a noise behind me and saw a guy with a huge iron bar come towards me and hit me with it right on the head.

“I collapsed on the ground. I had blood on my hand. He still had the iron bar and he was coming back towards me. I stood up and hid behind the MK2. People were running everywhere. I saw there was someone on the ground who was far more injured than me.”

There have been several knife attacks in France in recent months. Terrorism has been ruled out in most cases. On 23 August a man fatally stabbed his mother and sister and seriously injured another person in a town near Paris before being shot dead by police. Authorities said the 36-year-old had serious mental health problems and had been on a terrorism watchlist since 2016.

That attack came days after an Afghan asylum seeker was arrested in the town of Perigueux after a drunken rampage with a knife in which four people were wounded, one seriously.