A French plainclothes police officer overpowered a man armed with a knife on a train connecting Annecy (on the Swiss border) with Paris on Thursday, after a scuffle ensued in which a shot was fired without causing injury, however, to terrify the passengers.
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The man, around 30, was overpowered by a plainclothes police officer with whom he fought, Châlon-sur-Saône (east) deputy prosecutor Angélique Depetris told AFP. She stated that “a shot was fired” during this fight. .
A woman present on the high-speed train (TGV), Stéphanie Debord, told AFP that this man grabbed the police officer’s gun and fired, reporting two shots on his side.
Ms Depetris announced that a judicial inquiry had been opened into “the attempted murder of a person of public authority”.
The attack occurred near Le Creusot (east) when the train had completed about a third of its journey. The man was taken into custody, the deputy prosecutor said.
“After the Mâcon train station (about 70 km south of Le Creusot, Ed), a person who was at the entrance to the airlock entered with hands covered in blood. I said to the passenger behind me, “This guy is weird.” I noticed that he had smashed the window of the moving train with a hammer. He was completely emaciated elsewhere,” said Ms Debord, who was in car #2.
“The gentleman got up, he tried to control him, there was a fight, punches, kicks. There were screams,” she said.
“There, a plainclothes police officer who went to Paris on July 14 and was in carriage no. 5 was called by the inspector and told him that there appeared to be a problem in carriage 2. The cop was wearing a shorts t-shirt and had his gun on him. He tried to subdue the man, a foreigner who spoke no French and was beside himself. “The latter took the police officer’s gun and fired two shots,” said the 49-year-old passenger.
“It screamed. We all lay down between the seats because we were afraid he would get in the car, he was less than ten meters away. I was on the phone with my husband, he heard the shots on the phone, he said to me, “You stay down, you don’t move.”
The plainclothes police officer and another passenger, an off-duty employee of the state railway company SNCF, “asked people for belts (…) to try to control him,” the witness added. Thanks to them, we escaped a catastrophe,” the passenger explained.
Passengers who so wish could benefit from psychological support, she said.
The policeman was needed by SNCF employees as part of a program set up last year that allows police officers “to benefit from discounts or free travel on trains if they are armed,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin explained on Twitter.