Would-be assassin with a .22 rifle was disturbed and had 'a violent record'

Police dismiss theories that terrorists or far-right groups organised Bastille Day attempt

French investigators believe yesterday's attempt to assassinate President Jacques Chirac was the work of a deranged individual rather than a plot by terrorists or far-right extremists.

Maxime Brunerie, 25, was in a police psychiatric unit in Paris last night after admitting – in what investigators called "extremely confused language" – that he had gone to the Arc de Triomphe intending to murder the President.

Police said it was significant that Mr Brunerie had stood among spectators watching the Bastille Day military parade, armed with a low-powered .22 hunting rifle.

A trained assassin or terrorist would have chosen a more powerful weapon and one of the hundreds of windows or roofs overlooking the parade route down the Champs-Elysées, they said.

Although any assassination attempt on a French president will bring comparisons with Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal, based on attempts by French Algerians to murder Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, there appeared to be few resemblances between Mr Brunerie and the meticulous, professional and English assassin of the novel.

Police said that the gun he used was a .22 hunting rifle of the type used for shooting rabbits or other small game.

However, the fact that a disturbed young man could get so close to the President and release a shot before being overpowered – by spectators, rather than by police – raised serious questions about security for the parade.

The assassination attempt will also revive anxieties about France's relatively lax gun laws, already called into question after a depressed, ecological activist murdered eight people in the Nanterre council chamber west of Paris two months ago.

President Chirac made electoral capital out of that incident, claiming it was part of a surge of violent and criminal activity under the stewardship of the former Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin.

Maxime Brunerie, from the southern suburbs of Paris, was already known to police as a supporter of a neo-Nazi movement called the French and European Nationalist Party.

He also belonged to a far-right student movement called GUD and attended skinhead rallies. The French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that Mr Brunerie had "a police record for violence" but did not elaborate.

The would-be assassin was born in Evry, a new town 20 miles south of Paris, in May 1977, and still lived near by at Courcouronnes.

He had been a student and also worked as a chauffeur but, according to investigators, had not worked for some time because of "emotional problems".

His motives for attacking President Chirac remained unclear last night. Before being transferred to the police psychiatric unit, he told detectives at the Paris police headquarters on the Ile de Cité that he had "wanted to kill the President".

Mr Chirac continued to the 14 July garden party at the Elysée Palace, where guests said that he seemed unperturbed by the incident.

He was interviewed for almost an hour by three French television journalists on the state of the nation but none asked him about the assassination attempt.

It was already known that someone had been arrested after firing a gun during the parade, but it became clear only later that a shot had been fired at the President.

In the interview, Mr Chirac said that he was not going to rest on the laurels of his presidential election victory in May and the subsequent triumph of his centre-right supporters in the parliamentary elections last month."This is no time for personal satisfaction. It is a time for responsibility and action," he said.

Mr Chirac rejected assertions by left-wing politicians that he planned an amnesty for political-financial crimes, which would end a half-dozen investigations into his own activities while mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.

* Half of France's tanks and warplanes are out of action because of a lack of spare parts, the French Defence Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, said yesterday in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche.

Previous targets

1959 President Charles de Gaulle's decision to decolonise Algeria led to riots and assassination attempts. He was a target for the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), which saw his policies as a betrayal of French settlers in Algeria.

1958 François Mitterrand, later to become President, faked his assassination in a scandal, known as the Observatoire Affair, that he managed to dodge throughout his career.

1932 Paul Doumer, the last French president to be assassinated, was shot by Dr Paul Gorguloff, a Russian, a year after being voted President of the Third Republic.

1894 President Sadi Carnot was killed in Lyon by the anarchist Caserio. Carnot had refused to pardon another anarchist who had tried to blow up the National Assembly.