One Dead and Five Wounded in Racist Shooting Rampage Near Paris, Officials Call It Terrorism

A gunman killed one person and injured five others in northern France on Friday, in an attack that authorities have labelled racially motivated and terrorist. Among the wounded is a 12-year-old girl who was seriously hurt.

The shooting began at about 10:30am local time (08:30 GMT). According to the account of events, the attacker drove through Trappes and La Verriere, working-class communities on the outskirts of Paris with large immigrant and Muslim populations. He fired an automatic weapon at a petrol station, a medical centre and a children's playground. The rampage lasted roughly 15 minutes before police arrested the suspect, a 39-year-old identified as Kevin T.

Local MP Laurent Mazaury said the suspect told officers he wanted to "kill foreigners". "I think we are facing a racist person," Mazaury said. French media reported that the dead man was young and Black, and that the wounded included a woman in a headscarf and the girl, who was also wearing a headscarf. The victim who died was named as Pengo Bassio Wangi. The girl's mother said her daughter, who is of North African descent, was shot eight times and was moved to a children's hospital for surgery. Prosecutors said three of the five injured people are in critical condition.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said investigations were continuing but that it was "clearly a terrorist crime". Prosecutors are examining whether the suspect conspired with a "terrorist group", and a member of his immediate family circle has also been taken into custody. A local police chief told French media that investigators found an older-style semiautomatic weapon from the World War II era in the suspect's car, along with tear gas grenades. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu called the case "very serious" and said all security and judicial resources were fully mobilised.

President Emmanuel Macron described the incident as a "racist terrorist attack" and a "turning point in the life of our Republic and our nation". He said France remained determined to fight racism "in all its forms". Trappes mayor Ali Rabeh, who has Moroccan roots, said the gunman was firing at random and wanted to cause a "bloodbath". He called it "objectively a racist attack, probably Islamophobic" and said the victims could easily have been his own relatives. "Her crime was probably being of colour," he said of the wounded girl.

The girl's mother told broadcaster RTL: "How could anyone do this to a child?" She asked whether her daughter was targeted because of her headscarf and stressed that the girl was born in Trappes and has the right to build her life in France.

The attack comes as cost-of-living and student protests, often violent, grip the country. Authorities plan to deploy 70,000 police officers on Saturday, when more demonstrations are expected. Some far-right voices have blamed Muslim youths for the unrest.

Far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen condemned the shooting as "barbaric". Muslim groups, however, accused the populist right of fostering hatred through Islamophobic rhetoric, pointing to Le Pen's proposal, as she campaigns for the presidency, to fine women who wear the headscarf in public. Rabeh said politicians who make negative comments about Muslims are "criminals", while the French Muslim Council blamed promoters of anti-Muslim hate speech who it said have "blood on their hands".

Monitors say anti-Muslim hostility is growing more widely. Last week the European Parliament passed, by 381 votes to 167 with 15 abstentions, a resolution calling for an EU strategy against Islamist entryism and the Muslim Brotherhood network. Researcher Farid Hafez of Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative called it a major symbolic victory for anti-Muslim forces. Amnesty International said in June that Islamophobic violence in the United Kingdom had reached "emergency levels", while the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency says one in two Muslims in Europe face racial discrimination. In the US, California's attorney general reported anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 54 percent in 2025, from 24 to 38.