French police are waiting to interview the man suspected of ploughing a car into a group of soldiers as he recovers from wounds after being shot during his arrest, reports The Guardian.
The suspect has been named as Hamou Bachir Benlatreche, a 36-year-old Algerian national, legally resident in France and unknown to the security services. He is in a serious condition in hospital after he was shot while being apprehended on a motorway in northern France.
Benlatreche was driving the rented black BMW car used in the attack in Levallois-Perret, on the outskirts of Paris.
Detectives, who have linked the car but not the driver to the incident that left three soldiers seriously injured, have been searching his home in a north-west suburb of the French capital to establish a possible motive for the attack.
A police source told Le Figaro the suspect had a stable and legitimate job and appeared to be “perfectly unknown”. “He doesn’t appear to have been in any Islamist shadows,” a source told the paper.
A police officer told Agence France-Presse the suspect, who was shot five times after ramming a police vehicle trying to force him to stop, was still in hospital in Lille and not able to be questioned as yet.
Mohammed Benlatreche, the suspect’s uncle, said he did not recognise the photograph of his nephew with a long beard in the media, and insisted he had never shown any inclination toward or support for terrorism.
“He works hard, he gets up early to deliver things to stores. Then he was a taxi driver with Uber. It’s hardly believable it’s him they are talking about,” he said.
“I was astonished when I saw the picture on the television. I’ve never seen him with a beard. Never. He was always shaved. He attended prayers like any Muslim. You could have knocked me over,” Benlatreche told BFMTV.
He added his nephew had never shown the slightest extremist view. “Not to me, he didn’t.”
A trainee police officer was hailed as the hero of the hour on Thursday for spotting the suspect’s car as it sped north from Paris after the attack.
The officer, named only as Laurent, aged 29, was driving to work when the black BMW roared up behind him as he joined the motorway.
“He was going so fast, I had to move over an let him go,” Laurent told French journalists. “The windscreen was shattered, the bumper was dragging on the ground and the grill was dented.”
Thinking the driver was fleeing the scene of a road accident, the police officer made a mental note of the car’s registration number.