One person died and several people were injured this Wednesday, July 17 in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, after a car crashed into the terrace of a bar. The trail of a “road accident” East “privileged at this stage”indicates a police source. According to several witnesses, the events took place around 7:20 p.m., on the terrace of the Le Ramus bar. Six people were injured. Among them, three are in critical condition. The driver of the vehicle fled, but the passenger was arrested, detailed a police source. He tested positive for narcotics and alcohol, according to a source close to the case.
A black Toyota reportedly crashed into the terrace after the driver of the vehicle lost control. “There were about ten people on the terrace”said a witness, who added that he had seen several injured people, including “a man lying down and a man with his skull split open”. “I had to pull chairs over bleeding people”says another passerby. “I saw four people, three of them unconscious, and one person lying in his own blood.”says another witness.
Man arrested, crowd booed
At the entrance to his hotel, the manager tells Release : “The car passed twice very quickly” before rushing onto the terrace which he said was full. “The door fell, the chairs were all swept away, everyone was on the floor.” He claims to have seen a man of a “thirties” years to flee to the Père Lachaise cemetery. Nino, 17, did not see the accident directly. “At first I heard loud bangs, I thought it was gunshots. I went downstairs and my brother called the fire department.” Still shocked, he continues without stopping: “When I arrived there were people who were seriously injured. A man against a tree had his arm covered in blood, an elderly person was lying in his blood, on the side there was a mother and her daughter… A man came, he told me that his uncle worked at the bar and he started screaming when he saw him injured.”
According to him, a man was still in the vehicle when the police arrived a few minutes later. “They took him out and wanted to arrest him, he tried to escape but they managed to handcuff him. The crowd booed him. My mother was in tears at all that.”
Around the Gambetta roundabout, police, firefighter and military vehicles pile up. Weapons in hand, soldiers and police find themselves directing traffic for cyclists while new sirens are heard in the distance. A policeman moves onlookers away from an additional street. “It’s serious ?”, the young man asks him. “It may be serious, I cannot give you more information.”
Less than ten days before the Olympic Games
These events occur less than ten days before the opening of the Olympic Games, for which some 35,000 police officers and gendarmes and 18,000 French soldiers will be mobilized on average each day. From Thursday, at 5 a.m., and until July 26, the internal security and counterterrorism perimeter (SILT) will be activated in Paris around the banks of the Seine, in preparation for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Some 326,000 spectators – 104,000 paying seats on the lower quays, 222,000 free seats on the upper quays – are expected on July 26 to attend the opening ceremony on the Seine, the first in the history of the Games to take place outside a sports venue. The Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games “are not specifically targeted by international terrorist organizations”assured the national anti-terrorism prosecutor Olivier Christen on Tuesday, nevertheless stressing the “resurgence” of the terrorist threat for “the whole territory”.
Update At 9:37 p.m., the theory of a “road accident” is “preferred at this stage.”
Source: www.liberation.fr
