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PARIS—Three people were killed and three injured after a gunman opened fire in and around a Kurdish cultural center in the heart of the French capital, officials said, putting the city on edge two days before Christmas.
A 69-year-old male suspect, who officials said had previously been accused of anti-immigrant violence, was detained by police and taken to a hospital following the shooting, the officials said. The suspect is being held on suspicion of murder, voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault, they added.
Friday’s shooting took place in a busy neighborhood in the 10th arrondissement of the French capital, popular for its bars and restaurants.
The attacker opened fire in a Kurdish cultural center, a restaurant across the street and a hair salon nearby, Alexandra Cordebard, mayor of the 10th arrondissement, said on French television.
Police have sealed off the area and asked Parisians to stay away from the scene.
Police guard the scene of the attack in Paris’s 10th arrondissement.
Photo:
CLEMENT LANOT/Clement Lanot via REUTERS
People gather on Rue d’Enghien, the street where the gunman opened fire.
Photo:
daphne rousseau/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The suspect had been accused last December of attacking a migrant camp in a Paris park, wounding two people with a saber, and had recently been released from custody, authorities said. Migrants at that camp, located in the southeast of Paris, were mainly from Sudan, they added.
Racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant attacks have hit Europe several times in recent years. In 2020, a man killed multiple people in a string of shootings that began at a hookah bar in Hanau, Germany.
A year earlier, officials said an extremist who killed two people at a synagogue in eastern Germany had been planning a far bigger massacre.
In 2017, a man drove a van into a crowd of worshippers outside a mosque in North London, something officials described as a terrorist attack.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau speaks to media about Friday’s shooting.
Photo:
thomas samson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The attack on Friday took place nearly 10 years after three Kurdish women in Paris were shot in what officials said looked like a targeted assassination. Sakine Cansiz, a founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party; Fidan Dogan, a representative of the Brussels-based Kurdish National Congress; and a guest, Leyla Soylemez, were killed in January 2013.
The timing of Friday’s attack, in the run-up to Christmas, initially recalled the December 2018 terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, where a suspected Islamist radical killed multiple people. The suspect in that attack was killed two days later after he opened fire on police.
France at the time had been the subject of repeated Islamist attacks, including the Nov. 13, 2015, massacre that killed more than 130 people across Paris and the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that killed 86 people.
Write to Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com and Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
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