attack

French police on Tuesday arrested 16 people, including two women,  over their suspected involvement in an attack on two officers attempting to disperse an unauthorised wharehouse party in a Paris suburb last December 31st, when video published on social media showed a policewoman being kicked by a mob after she fell to the ground.

A French soldier escaped injury after a knifeman who attacked him and colleagues on foot patrol in the busy central Paris underground train station Châtelet was wrestled to the ground and detained, prompting the opening of a counter-terrorism investigation. 

An elderly Jewish couple and their son were beaten and robbed in their home in a suburb west of Paris by a gang in what interior minister Gérard Collomb said appeared to have been an attack "directly linked to their religion".   

French defence minister Florence Parly said Tuesday that the country's armed forces are to begin using drones for combat missions for the first time, on top of current surveillance missions, ending debate about pilots operating at a great distance from the battle ground.

Hamou Bachir Benlatreche, a 36-year-old Algerian national legally resident in France and who was shot five times during his arrest in northern France on suspicion of carrying out a car-ramming attack on six soldiers in a Paris suburb, is deemed unfit for questioning as he recovers in hospital.

A man was arrested by police after a shootout on a motorway near Calais on Wednesday when the car he was driving matched the description of that which in the early morning had deliberately rammed six soldiers close to barracks in the Paris suburb of  Levallois-Perret, leaving three of them seriously injured.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 44, was left unconscious after she fell over when a man violently confronted her while the conservative former minister was campaigning for next Sunday's legislative elections at a street market in the Latin Quarter of Paris on Thursday morning.

At least one policeman died and another was seriously wounded in a shooting incident on the Champs-Elysées avenue in central Paris, reportedly after one or more assailants opened fire on a police bus.

French forein minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has said his country's intelligence services will present proof that the Syrian regime launched a chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhun on April 4th which claimed 86 lives, which both Damascus and its allies, Russia and Iran, have denied.

Chief Paris public prosecutor François Molins said the man who attacked a military patrol at Paris' Orly airport on Saturday morning before being shot dead said he told the soldiers he wanted to die 'in the name of Allah' and that 'whatever happens, there will be deaths'.

Orly airport, where about 3,000 people were evacuated Saturday morning after a man who attacked a military security patrol was shot dead, began returning to normal sevice late in the day; the father and brother of the assailant, 39-year-old Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a French national with a string of convictions for violent crime and who the French authorities report became close to radical Islamist movements in prison, were taken into custody for questioning.  

A police investigation has been opened into the attack on the two brothers, aged 29 and 17, who said they were assaulted as they drove through Bondy, east of Paris, by two men in a van who were soon joined by others, one wielding a metal saw, and which left them both hospitalised.

Fugitive Anis Amri, the Tunisian wanted as the main suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack on Monday which left 12 people dead, was shot and killed by police in Milan early on Friday after entering Italy via the French town of Chambéry, in the south-east Savoie region, according to Italian officials.

The drive-by attack by two people on a motorbike against the French embassy in Athens left a policeman wounded and ocuured just days before an official visit to Greece by outgoing US president Barack Obama.

A TV crew filming migrants apparently awaiting an opportunity to stow away in trucks at a service station near the Channel port were set upon last Thursday evening in what they believe was probably an attack motivated by a people smuggler who was on the images.