GRENOBLE: French police were on Thursday searching for an unidentified man who hurled a grenade into a bar in the southeastern city of Grenoble, injuring 12 people.
The attacker, whose motive was still unclear, entered the Aksehir bar, situated in a rough neighbourhood of the city, shortly after 8:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Wednesday, prosecutors said.
“Someone came in and threw a grenade, apparently without saying a word, and ran away,“ prosecutor Francois Touret-de-Courcy told reporters.
Two of the wounded were still in critical condition Thursday.
“I heard a loud bang,“ said Agnes Lefebvre-Paquet, a witness in her 70s.
“And I said to myself that it wasn’t a firecracker. I assumed it was a neighbourhood problem.”
Another neighbour, dressed in a nightgown and who declined to give her name, said: “We’re all shocked.”
She said she had lived in the area for 30 years and it was “getting worse and worse”.
Touret-de-Courcy said the man may have also carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle but if he did, he did not appear to have fired it.
“From what we can tell, all the damage was caused by the exploding grenade,“ he said.
“Many clients” were present when the grenade exploded at the bar in the Olympic Village neighbourhood, built when the Alpine city hosted the 1968 Winter Olympics.
Touret-de-Courcy said investigators had not yet identified a motive but did not believe it was a “terrorist attack”.
“There’s nothing to make us think it’s linked to terrorism,“ he said, calling it an “act of extreme violence” that “may be linked to a settling of scores”.
‘Anything is possible’
Investigators are looking at a possible connection to drug trafficking, he said.
Gang-related killings have become increasingly frequent in Grenoble and its suburbs.
“I condemn in the strongest possible terms this criminal act of extraordinary violence,“ Grenoble Mayor Eric Piolle wrote on X.
Deputy Mayor Chloe Pantel told AFP the bar is “a spot where locals and people from outside the neighbourhood gather, especially to watch football matches”.
The community bar, named after a town in Turkey, is run by Algerian managers and frequented mostly by men, according to neighbours.
Touret de Coucy said it was “not particularly considered to be a problem spot”.
Karim, a city employee who gave only his first name, said he was a regular at the bar, which he described as usually calm.
“You go there for a coffee and a chat,“ he said, however adding: “In Grenoble anything is possible.”
Some 80 first responders were mobilised after the attack, with police still present in numbers at the cordoned-off scene early Thursday.
France’s Health Minister Yannick Neuder is due to visit victims and medical staff at Grenoble University Hospital on Thursday morning.
