Police make motorway arrest after car drives into soldiers

The suspect — reportedly unarmed — was taken to hospital after he was stopped near a petrol station on the A16 motorway between Boulogne-sur-Mer and Calais. A police officer was injured by a stray bullet during the arrest.

The French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, said the man was driving the BMW used in Wednesday morning's attack but gave no other details.

The incident occurred at about 8am during the changeover of soldiers stationed at Place de Verdun, not far from the town hall in Levallois-Perret. Six members of the 35th infantry regiment were injured. None have life-threatening injuries.

The weekly council of ministers was taking place at the Élysée Palace as the first reports emerged. Counter-terrorism prosecutors later opened an investigation.

Patrick Balkany, mayor of Levallois-Perret, told BFMTV a BMW parked nearby appeared to have been waiting for the soldiers to leave their barracks. The vehicle was driven the wrong way down a one-way street before it hit the troops and sped off. Balkany described the attack as a "deliberate aggression".

"It's without doubt a deliberate act … This vehicle was waiting for them," he said. "The BMW accelerated very quickly the moment they came out. This happened in the middle of the town. It happened very quickly.

"Levallois is a calm place … this is an odious aggression against our military that nobody expected."

Witnesses suggested the driver was the only person in the vehicle, which was allegedly parked in a cul-de-sac near Place de Verdun before the incident. Security services have been sent to the area, which has been sealed off.

Nadia LeProhon was startled by a loud crash outside her building and rushed outside to see two soldiers on the ground. Other soldiers ran after a speeding car, shouting: "After him! Follow that car!"

She said the scream that followed the crash was still echoing through her head. "I'll never forget that scream, a scream of pain and distress," she told the Associated Press.

Jean-Claude Veillant, a resident, said he saw two uniformed soldiers prone on the ground when he came down to the entrance of his 13-storey building. "It was horrible," he said, adding that both soldiers appeared to be in bad shape and one of them was unconscious.

Police officials say the driver apparently ambushed the soldiers and rammed into them as they emerged from a building to approach their vehicles to start a new patrol shift.

Roger Karoutchi, a local senator, said: "We have to be careful, but it wasn't a classic road accident. As for the motives, we will have to wait until the person or people concerned are arrested."

The soldiers were deployed as part of Opération Sentinelle. About 10,000 soldiers and 4,700 police and gendarmes are involved in the operation, which was launched under France's ongoing state of emergency introduced after the November 2015 terrorist attacks.

Gerard Collomb, the interior minister, visited the scene of the attack on Wednesday afternoon. He said the car had started driving slowly and about five metres from the soldiers suddenly accelerated. "It was clearly a deliberate act," Collomb said.

The defence minister, Florence Parly, who accompanied Collomb to Levallois-Perret, condemned the "cowardly act", saying it did "nothing to dent soldiers' determination to work for the security of the French people".

Although French authorities remain cautious as to the motives of the driver, the incident appears to be the latest assault on France's security forces. It came four days after Opération Sentinelle soldiers arrested an 18-year-old man with a history of psychological problems at the Eiffel Tower, where he had brandished a knife and shouted "Allahu Akbar". He told investigators he wanted to kill a soldier, sources close to the case told Agence France-Presse.

In April, a police officer was killed in a shooting on the Champs-Elysées. In June, an Islamic State supporter drove a car loaded with gas bottles into a military vehicle on the same road. The attacker died when the car caught fire.