Police shot a man who attacked an officer with a hammer in front of Notre Dame cathedral this afternoon in what could be a terrorist incident.
Anti-terrorism prosecutors were on the scene after the man was taken to hospital with severe wounds to his chest. A police officer was slightly injured by the man.
Police sealed off the area and cleared crowds of tourists from the front of the cathedral minutes after the incident shortly after 4pm local time. Some tourists ran, sparking a brief panic. The authorities in Paris asked the public to stay away from Notre Dame.
Cedric Michel, a police union official, said that the attacker appeared with a hammer in his hand and threatened an officer on patrol outside the cathedral. Another officer fired shots with his service pistol to “neutralise” the man, Mr Michel said.
The motive for the attack was not known immediately but it could be the fourth attack by a solitary Islamist extremist in Paris this year. In the last fatal attack, a policeman was shot dead on the Champs-Élysées on April 20, three days before the first round of the presidential election.
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Patrolling soldiers shot dead men who attacked them in the Louvre museum shopping centre and at Orly earlier in the year.
Security forces have borne the brunt of Islamist assaults in France since the massacre of 86 people by a radicalised Tunisian who drove a truck into the crowd on the waterside in Nice on July 14 last year. In 2015, 137 people were killed in two series of attacks in and around Paris in January and November of that year.
President Macron has extended for a sixth time a state of emergency that was proclaimed after the November 2015 attacks in Paris.
Five people, including three young women, were charged last year with plotting to stage an explosion with gas canisters in a car boot on a street near Notre Dame cathedral. The canisters were found n the boot of a parked car.