A man with a shotgun killed four people and wounded seven in the central city of Tours yesterday in what the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, called an "act of murderous madness" by a deranged individual.
Local officials said the man, who was later shot by police and arrested, opened fire on passers-by in the city centre at 9.55 a.m. close to the main post office and railway station and then turned his weapon on police.
The Tours prefecture (government office) identified the man as a 44-year-old worker for the SNCF state railway and said he may have had a grudge against his employers.
Police sources said the man had been questioned in hospital, but his answers were incoherent.
Television film showed armed police leading the man, dressed in a brown leather jacket and jeans, away from the entrance to an underground car park in handcuffs with blood on his hands.
Armed police, including some 30 members of the crack RAID squad which deals with major shootings and hostage takings, evacuated the city centre and surrounded the car park.
Witnesses said the man got out of his car at a busy intersection near the city's courthouse and city hall shortly before 10 a.m. He put on a ski mask and began shooting at random at passers-by and vehicles. He shot two police officers who tried to intervene, wounding one in the neck and the other in the arm, witnesses said. A third officer was also injured. "We saw him walking back and forth and aiming at people," said Mr Stephane Bocquet, a caretaker at city hall. "He seemed completely mad."
Mr Bocquet described a scene of panic. Local people sought to hide from the gunman as he calmly kept re-loading his rifle and firing. Suspicions that an alleged accomplice may have fled into the car park turned out to be unfounded, police said, and a search revealed no explosives.
Mr Jospin, speaking in the northern city of Rennes, said the gunman appeared to have been deranged. "The person who opened fire does not appear to have any criminal record," Mr Jospin told reporters. "It seems to be someone working in the public sector who went crazy," he said.
Local officials identified the dead as four men, aged between 33 and 66. None of the wounded, who included three police officers, was in serious condition.
French security forces have been on high alert since the September 11th attacks on the US.
France has increased the number of police and security forces in city centres under an anti-terrorism plan first used in the mid-1990s during bomb attacks by Algerian militants.
Mr Jospin denied there had been a security lapse. "When someone, if this is the case, is seized by an act of murderous madness, that's not a matter of ordinary security. I don't think the two things should be mixed up," he said.
A French police union, the UNSA, said the shooting highlighted the need for tougher weapons legislation.