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Twelve wounded in grenade attack on Grenoble bar

A grenade attack on a bar in Grenoble, south-east France, which left 12 people wounded, two of them critically, is not being treated as a terrorist attack, a local prosecutor said, but as a possible 'settling of scores'.

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French police were on Thursday searching for an unidentified man who hurled a grenade into a bar in the southeastern city of Grenoble, wounding 12 people, reports Barron's.

The attacker, whose motive was still unclear, entered the Aksehir bar, situated in a rough neighbourhood of the city, shortly after 8:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Wednesday, prosecutors said.

"Someone came in and threw a grenade, apparently without saying a word, and ran away," prosecutor Francois Touret-de-Courcy told reporters.

Two of the wounded were still in critical condition Thursday.

"I heard a loud bang," said Agnes Lefebvre-Paquet, a witness in her 70s.

"And I said to myself that it wasn't a firecracker. I assumed it was a neighbourhood problem."

Another neighbour, dressed in a nightgown and who declined to give her name, said: "We're all shocked."

She said she had lived in the area for 30 years and it was "getting worse and worse".

Touret-de-Courcy said the man may have also carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle but if he did, he did not appear to have fired it.

Read more of this AFP report published by Barron's.