Police opened fire on Tuesday, October 31, in the morning at the RER Bibliothèque François Mitterrand train station in the 13th arrondissement of Paris to subdue a threatening woman who was advocating terrorism, according to the police contacted by our colleagues at franceinfo. Her life prognosis is engaged.
The woman threatened to “blow herself up.” According to the police officers, a station user called the police around 7:30 am to report the behavior of this 38-year-old woman, who was fully veiled and making statements advocating terrorism, on an RER train traveling in Val-de-Marne, said the prefect of police in Paris, Laurent Nuñez, during a press conference. “You will all pass”, “Allah Akbar”, “Boom,” she declared, according to these witnesses, added the prefect of police.
The woman was then located at the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand station in Paris, which was quickly evacuated by the police. The station was still closed on Tuesday afternoon and the Minister of Transport, Clément Beaune, went there.
The police officers “asked her to sit on the ground,” explained the prefect. But the woman got up and “headed towards the police officers.” They “issued warnings” to her, asking her not to move and to show her hands to check for weapons, but she “refused to comply with these warnings,” detailed the prefect of police. “The woman refused to comply with the police officers’ orders and threatened to blow herself up,” according to the prosecutor.
Two police officers then fired eight times, the prosecutor specified. The woman was seriously injured in the abdomen and hospitalized. Her “life prognosis is engaged,” the prosecutor said. According to several consistent sources, no explosive device was found on this woman.
Her identity to be confirmed. “The identity of this person is not yet certain,” the prefect continued, even if an identity lead is favored by the investigators. “Assuming this identity is correct, this person was known to the police for incidents dating back to July 2021,” the prefect explained. “Dressed in a full veil, she had walked around with a screwdriver in hand, making religious statements, with a threatening attitude, which led to her arrest with the help of Operation Sentinelle soldiers.” This person “had been held in custody for a while and then, showing obvious psychiatric problems, she had been hospitalized at that time,” he continued.
Two investigations have been opened, the first entrusted to the judicial police of Paris for advocacy, death threats, and intimidation of a public official, the other entrusted to the IGPN for voluntary violence with a weapon by a person in authority, regarding the use of firearms.
