Police shoot, injure attacker outside Paris's Notre-Dame cathedral

Paris (AFP) - A French police officer shot and injured a man who attacked him with a hammer outside Paris's Notre-Dame cathedral on Tuesday, authorities said.

Police sealed off the area in front of the cathedral, where the attacker lay injured on the ground.

The attack comes with France on high alert for more jihadist strikes after a weekend attack in London, where extremists used a van and knives to crush to death and kill seven people, one of them French.

Authorities in Paris asked the public to stay away from Notre-Dame, one of France's biggest tourist attractions situated on the banks of the Seine river in the heart of the capital.

French TV reported scenes of panic during the shooting, with tourists scrambling for cover.

France is under a state of emergency and on its highest possible level of alert following a string of terror attacks that began in 2015, which have killed over 230 people.

In the last fatal attack, a policeman was shot and killed on Paris's prestigious Champs-Elysees avenue on April 20, three days before the first round of the presidential election.

Major attacks in France targeted the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in January 2015 and in November that year, gunmen and suicide bombers attacked sites around Paris including the Bataclan concert hall, killing 130 people.

Then in July last year, a radicalised Tunisian man drove a lorry at high speed through a Bastille Day fireworks display on the Nice waterfront, massacring 86 people.

Since then there have been a series of smaller attacks, often targeting security forces.

Sounds like a head case rather than a terrorist - not that he couldn't be both....

I think the fact he shouted "This is for Syria" says it all. LL

Trouble is, the headcases get inspired by the hardcore religious fanatics and decide to attack infidels themselves.

A man was shot by police after he attacked an officer with a hammer outside Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral

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I wonder when it will dawn on the crazies that the days of the police trying to engage with them are long gone, and they are just going to end up face down and leaking blood onto the pavement?

Officials: Notre Dame police attacker was doctoral student

PARIS (AP) — The man who attacked police officers patrolling in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, crying out "This is for Syria!," was a former journalist who was working on a doctoral thesis and had not been suspected of radicalization, according to university officials and the French government's spokesman.

Christopher Castaner told RTL radio on Wednesday that police were quickly able to classify the hammer attack as a "terrorist act" because of "the words he said." An officer was slightly injured in the Tuesday attack and the attacker remained hospitalized after being shot by police. Police have not released his name.

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but police searching the man's residence outside Paris found a declaration of allegiance to the Islamic State group, according to the Paris prosecutor's office.

A student identity card showed he was from Algeria and 40 years old. The university of Lorraine's president, Pierre Mutzenhardt, told France Bleu radio that the man was enrolled as one of its students and had been working since 2014 on a thesis about North African media. He said the man previously worked as a journalist for North African media.

"There'd been no difficulties with him. Nothing strange had been detected," he said. His thesis director, Arnaud Mercier, told broadcaster BFM that the suspect spoke Swedish, Arabic and French and that his resume mentioned that he had worked as a journalist in Sweden and Algeria.

"He was someone who believed a lot in democratic ideals, the expression of free thinking, in journalism," Mercier said on BFM. "Nothing, absolutely nothing, foretold that one day he'd be a jihadi who'd want to kill a policeman in the name of I don't know what cause."

That's an odd one, LL.