«A racist attack»: six months after the vote for the Elysée in which Marine Le Pen is flying in the polls and on the eve of a new Saturday with a high risk of violence and looting on the sidelines of the demonstrations against the high cost of living, a man suspected of having wanted to act against blacks and Arabs opened fire between Trappes and La Verrière, about forty kilometers south of Paris, killing a twenty-six year old of African origins and wounding five other people, including a 12-year-old girl years in serious condition. According to reconstructions, the man – identified as Kevin T., 39 years old – was driving a car in possession of a machine gun, tear gas, but also cocaine. He opened fire around ten in the morning from the passenger compartment of his Renault Clio. “He clearly shot at random and wanted to cause carnage”: commented the mayor of Trappes, Ali Rabeh, the first to denounce “an attack with a racist, probably Islamophobic connotation”.
He was stopped and arrested almost immediately from the scene of the shooting, just in time – the authorities explain – before he could claim more victims. Unknown to the 007s, Kevin T. was only known to the police for drink driving, theft and possession of drugs. During the search in his apartment, in the nearby municipality of Plaisir, the police found a sort of “trap with gas cylinders”, and the entire building was evacuated to avoid the risk of explosions while awaiting the intervention of the bomb squad. The inhabitants were welcomed into the nearby sports hall. When interviewed, the neighbors did not hide the fact that they were in shock: «If it had only hit blacks and Arabs it could have shot us too. The most terrible thing is the 12 year old girl injured. How can it come to this?
In the evening, President Emmanuel Macron arrived unexpectedly at the site of the attack to express “his solidarity” and support for the shocked community and meet the mayor, rescuers and some residents. It is the Elysée that openly speaks of a “racist terrorist attack”. The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office had already announced the opening of an investigation for terrorism with the aggravating circumstance that the facts “were perpetrated due to belonging, real or presumed, to a specific race, ethnicity, nation or religion”. «In the face of this terrible ordeal, the Nation stands alongside «the victims and their families,» Macron wrote in a message on X, addressing «thanks to our law enforcement agencies». “This is clearly a terrorist crime, an extremely serious act,” declared Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, who also arrived on site. Five officers from the anti-crime brigade (BAC) “stopped the perpetrator very quickly” in the street, and “in all likelihood interrupted his path to death” which lasted about a quarter of an hour, he pointed out to reporters. Already in the morning, the mayor had told BFMTV that the deceased victim was “of African origins” and another injured in serious condition “of Maghrebi origins”. For her part, the leader of the Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen, wrote on