Chirac assassination bid foiled

Neo-Nazi overpowered by sightseers after firing shot from hunting rifle during Bastille Day celebration

A neo-Nazi activist tried to assassinate President Jacques Chirac yesterday as he began his traditional Bastille Day review of French troops amid tens of thousands of sightseers on the Champs-Elysées.

The 25-year-old attacker, identified as Maxime Brunerie, was standing in the crowd close to the Arc de Triomphe and fired one shot from a low-calibre hunting rifle before he was overpowered by bystanders. He then tried to kill himself but was seized and arrested by police.

It remained unclear last night what had happened to the single bullet. It appears that President Chirac, who was standing up in the back of a military jeep, was unaware he had come under fire.

Although an anti-terror squad was taking part in the investigations, French investigators believe Mr Brunerie was a disturbed individual, acting alone. In a garbled confession, he told police that he had gone to the corner of the Etoile and the Champs-Elysées to murder the President.

Mr Brunerie, a member of a neo-Nazi party with a personal record of violence, penetrated the supposed heavy security surrounding the parade by hiding his .22 rifle inside a brown guitar case.

Witnesses said they saw a shaven-headed young man in a blue jacket take out the gun and point it at the President as Mr Chirac's jeep left the Etoile – the area around the Arc de Triomphe – and turned into the flag-bedecked Champs-Elysées.

Mohamed Chelali, a 50-year-old Canadian tourist, said: "I felt a swaying in the crowd. I looked and saw a man two or three metres away, pointing a gun at the President. One of the other people in the crowd hit his hand and I grabbed hold of part of the gun. A piece of metal fell to the ground. A third person held the barrel of the gun in the air."

A struggle followed before police, alerted by screams, came to the scene. "The young man said nothing but would not let go of his weapon. We were holding on to the gun while someone else grabbed him by the neck," Mr Chelali said.

Mr Brunerie, who was being held in a police psychiatric unit to prevent another suicide attempt, also belonged to Groupe Union Défense (GUD), a far-right student group. His views appeared to be more extreme than those of the French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was crushed by Mr Chirac in the second round of presidential elections in May.

None the less, the possibility that Mr Brunerie was seeking revenge for this defeat was being explored by investigators who searched his home in Essonne, in the southern suburbs of Paris. For hours after the incident, there was uncertainty as to whether an assassination attempt had taken place. The confusion was ended by Mr Chirac's wife, Bernadette, in characteristically crisp manner. Asked at the Bastille Day garden party at the Elysée Palace whether someone had tried to kill her husband, she replied: "Yes. Clearly."

But the police were officially reluctant to label it an attempted assassination. "He fired in the direction of the car but the bullet went astray and nobody was injured," Nicolas Couteau, of the Force Ouvrière police union, said. "I don't think there was any plot because the shooter would have used a gun of a larger calibre."