Suspect arrested is an Afghan national https://t.co/xQSGhIAfZ5— Patrick Poole (@pspoole) August 31, 2019
Reuters News
reporting by Catherine Lagrange; writing by Matthias Blamont; editing by Edmund Blair
Saturday August 31, 2019
LYON, France - One person was killed and at least nine others wounded on Saturday in the city of Villeurbanne near Lyon in central France after a suspected knife attack, a police source told Reuters.
A suspect carrying a knife was arrested, the source said. A second source close to the police said the man had told officers he was an Afghan national.
The police source said the motivation for the suspected attack, which took place around 1430 GMT, was not immediately clear.
The police source said authorities had been hunting for a suspected second attacker. But the second source said this search was now not being pursued, adding that the victim was aged 19.
The suspected attacker assaulted residents waiting at a bus stop and then ran towards an underground station before being seized by other local people and transport staff, Lyon mayor Lyon Gerard Collomb told reporters.
A helicopter was patrolling the area, a Reuters correspondent at the location reported.
Euro News
written by Alastair Jamieson & Chris Harris and AFP
Saturday August 31, 2019
A man armed with a knife and a barbecue fork attacked passers-by at a metro station in the Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne on Saturday, killing a 19-year-old and injuring eight others, three of whom were critically wounded.
The suspect, whose motives are unexplained, was arrested and taken into police custody for "murder and attempted murder,” the Lyon prosecutor's office told AFP.
Authorities initially reported a second suspect on the run, but the prosecutor and a police source later denied the existence of a second perpetrator.
The attack happened at 4:30 pm at Laurent Bonnevay metro station.
The suspect was initially detained by passers-by, including TCL transit workers.
“I sensed that something was not right and when I got to the lift I saw that some people had stopped someone,” a 39-year-old mother-of-one at the scene told Euronews.
“I saw some people in front of the lift who shouted at a man ‘stay there’ and ‘don’t move’. There were maybe three men who had stopped him, it wasn’t police.”
She added: “I thought it was a robbery at first. Someone else, I’m not sure if it was a security guard, said to me: ‘Get away from here’. I saw a man with some blood on his t-shirt.”
Among the injured, three were critical and five less seriously hurt, according to the prosecutor's office. In addition, 20 others were treated for shock.
"There was a gentleman at the 57 [bus] stop who started stabbing people in all directions," a young girl with a blood-stained tank top told AFP.
"He managed to touch, to open a person's stomach. He stabbed a guy in the head,” she cried.
The mayor of Lyon, Gérard Collomb, quickly went to the scene and called for people not to speculate about the nature of the attack.
He said the suspect had targeted "people waiting for their buses in a high-traffic area" and was on his trying to flee through the metro station when he was apprehended.
In May, a parcel bomb in the heart of Lyon wounded 14 people. France's third largest city has otherwise bemn spared by the unprecedented wave of jihadist attacks (251 dead) that have hit France since 2015.
The suspect in the bombing, a radicalized 24-year-old Algerian, Mohamed Hichem Medjoub, was indicted and imprisoned.
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