About 300 people were evacuated from a district of Sarcelles, north of Paris, on Saturday evening after a suspicious vehicle found near a synagogue was discovered to contain what Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described as “a weapon of war”.
Nuñez said on Sunday that a judicial investigation had been opened after the vehicle, flagged by domestic intelligence, was found close to a synagogue in the Val-d’Oise town.
He said the exact motive was not yet known and that the people involved had not been identified.
At this stage, there is nothing to classify the case as terrorism, he said, adding that investigators would determine the nature of the incident.
A security perimeter was set up around the parked car in a busy part of the town on Saturday evening, near a cinema and several restaurants, which were evacuated early in the evening.
The town’s main synagogue is not far from the street where the car was parked. After bomb disposal officers examined the vehicle and found no explosives, police discovered what a police source described as an assault rifle and a handgun inside.
A police source had earlier told AFP that the vehicle, considered “worrying”, had been reported stolen.
Nuñez also said that three attacks had been thwarted since the start of the year, including the knife attack on a gendarme beneath the Arc de Triomphe in February during the ceremony to rekindle the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
