Five people have been injured, two of them seriously, after a driver rammed into pedestrians and cyclists on Île d’Oléron, a popular tourist destination off France’s Atlantic coast, authorities have said.
The driver has been arrested and an investigation opened into attempted murder, the La Rochelle public prosecutor, Arnaud Laraize, said on Wednesday. France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office said it was observing the case but was not so far involved.
Laraize told local media the 35-year-old suspect, a resident of the island, had “deliberately hit several pedestrians and cyclists” along several kilometres of a road between the towns of Saint-Pierre d’Oléron and Dolus d’Oléron.
The man had then tried to set fire to his car before gendarmes shot him with a stun gun and arrested him. Laraize said he had shouted “Allahu Akbar”, Arabic for “God is greatest”, during the arrest, but that his motive was not immediately clear.
“He is known for minor offences such as theft,” the Sud Ouest newspaper quoted Laraize as saying. The prosecutor said the suspect “was not on the S watchlist”, an investigators’ list of radicalised individuals. The Charente Libre newspaper said he was a French national.
Le Parisien newspaper cited police as saying they were looking into the possibility that the suspect might be mentally ill. BFMTV reported that he was previously known to police for petty crime including drink-driving and drug offences.
The mayor of St Pierre d’Oléron, Christophe Sueur, said the suspect was “well-known, particularly by the gendarmerie, for problem behaviour, for problems with alcohol”. He told BFMTV the man “deliberately set out … to hit all the people he came across”.
He said several people had been taken to hospital in Poitiers by helicopter but that none had life-threatening injuries. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, later said two people were in a very serious condition.
A National Rally MP, Pascal Markowsky, said his parliamentary assistant was among the victims and was “very seriously wounded”.
Nuñez arrived at the scene of the attack in the early afternoon.
