On Thursday evening, a man attempted to ram his car into a crowd assembled in front of a mosque Parisian suburb of Creteil. He was quickly apprehended by police before inflicting any damage on civilians with his heavy-duty 4X4 vehicle. No one was reported injured as a result of the incident.
“Police said the man’s motives were unclear, and that he had not succeeded in driving into the crowd because of barriers placed in front of the mosque,” reports The Guardian.
According to French outlet Le Parisien, the suspect reportedly said he carried out his attack to “avenge the Bataclan and the Champs-Élysées.” He is believed to be of Armenian origin, notes Newsweek.
“Bataclan” and “Champs-Élysées” refer to the locations of recent ISIS terrorist attacks against French civilians and police. The Bataclan concert hall massacre in 2005 was one of the deadliest attacks on French soil by a jihadist group. The ISIS attack took the lives of 90 people and injured many others.
Thursday’s attempted car-ramming attack in the outskirts appears to be a copy-cat of last week’s Finsbury Park mosque attack, in which a 47-year-old man rented a van and drove 150 miles to London to drive his vehicle into Muslim parishioners outside of a mosque and Islamic welfare center. The suspect was identified as Darren Osborne. He was arrested at the scene of the crime.