PARIS — A 12-year-old girl was killed on Monday and 13 people were injured when a car rammed into diners at a pizzeria in a village east of Paris, the local deputy prosecutor said.
Deputy prosecutor Eric de Valroger said the driver, who was arrested at the scene, had undoubtedly driven into the restaurant in the village of Sept-Sorts deliberately.
“At this stage in the investigation, I am ruling out terrorist motives,” he added.
The injured included a 3-year-old boy who had been transferred to the Necker children’s hospital in Paris in critical condition, de Valroger said. Four of the other victims were in a serious condition.
Officials had initially said that the dead girl was 13.
Television pictures from the village of Sept-Sorts showed the BMW almost completely inside the pizzeria, having apparently smashed through tables on an outside terrace and a glass window.
An eyewitness told RMC radio that she saw the car drive into the terrace and hit the bar.
The driver tried to reverse out again but someone blocked him, and the gendarmes “arrived fairly quickly and took him away,” she told the broadcaster.
“All the people who were on the terrace were mown down,” she said.
The driver was a 31-year-old from the nearby town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, de Valroger said. The fact that he had had to exit from the road he was on and then drove into the pizzeria at speed left no room for doubt that he had acted deliberately, he added.
The incident came five days after a car rammed an army patrol in a Paris suburb, injuring six soldiers. Prosecutors are treating that as a terrorist incident.
The suspect in that incident was shot and seriously injured during his arrest on a motorway north of Paris hours later.
French security forces are on high alert after a series of terrorist attacks that have killed more than 230 people since the beginning of 2015.