CNN
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At least six people were injured in an attack at Paris’s Gare du Nord train station early on Wednesday, restricting access to one of the French capital’s main rail hubs.
An individual began attacking people at 6:42 a.m. local time and was neutralized a minute later, according to French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. The individual was disarmed by off-duty police returning home and border police, Darmanin told a news conference.
The assailant made the weapon himself, Darmanin added. Paris police had earlier said the individual began attacking people with a knife at 6:45 a.m. local time.
Several officers opened fire, including a security guard working for train operator SNCF, police said. Several shots were fired and the alleged attacker was injured.
A spokesperson for the Paris prosecutor’s office said six people were injured, including a member of the French border police. One of the injured is in critical condition. The suspect is also in critical condition, the spokesperson said.
The motive for the knife attack is unknown, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
France’s national counter-terrorism prosecutor’s office said it was “assessing the facts” regarding the attack, but has yet to take up the case. The fact that the alleged attacker was injured may lengthen the time it will take to assess the facts of the case, the office added.
Darmanin arrived at Gare du Nord shortly after Wednesday morning’s attack. Earlier he wrote on Twitter that the alleged attacker injured several people before being “quickly neutralized”.
“Thank you to the police for their effective and courageous response,” Darmanin tweeted.
CNN affiliate BFMTV interviewed a woman, identified only as Lili, who witnessed the attack and helped injured victims.
“My friends and I were going on vacation this morning and we were at the entrance to the station when we heard people screaming,” she said.
“We saw two people on the ground. One hit the other. People tried to separate them and that’s when the attacker pulled out his gun. People started shouting “Knife!” and started running away. I helped the first victim who was attacked and felt like the individual was going after anyone who tried to get close to him and overpower him.
“I helped the injured person who had been assaulted and was in shock. I took them to the police and then tried to find my friends and that’s when we heard the gunshots. The armed forces reacted very quickly to the attack. It didn’t even last five minutes even though it felt like an eternity.
“We are all shocked by what we saw. We were two meters away. It could have been one of us because we were so close. It is very traumatic.”
According to the CNN team at the station, a few hundred people gathered in the main hall of Gare du Nord, many of whom were looking for information about trains after the attack.
Several dozen police officers were posted around a security perimeter that blocked off much of the station’s main concourse, blocking access to several intercity train platforms, according to the CNN team. Access to the Eurostar terminal has since reopened, after several hours of interruption.
Police screens obscured the scene of the attack, but officers could be seen collecting evidence in paper bags.
As residents of Paris had begun to relax after several years of heightened tensions over the terror attacks, Wednesday’s incident, which is not currently being investigated as terrorism-related by French authorities, is the second in two months. In December, a man who was then the subject of an investigation by the Paris prosecutor’s office for racist violence shot dead three Kurdish activists in northern Paris.
Despite everything, the atmosphere at Gare du Nord was calm around lunchtime on Wednesday and passengers seemed to be hoping to catch their trains.
