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Police are securing the site of a knife attack in Paris on Monday, September 10, 2018. Several people were injured in a knife attack in central Paris on Sunday night, but police said that terrorism was no longer a problem. 39, was not suspected. (Thibault Camus / Associated Press)
PARIS – They only came out to play pétanque and enjoy the warmth of summer on the edge of a Parisian canal. By the end of the evening, the three friends had neutralized a stabbed attacker who had stabbed seven people, with an improbable weapon: the metal balls, tight and heavy, of the game.
Throwing dozens of times on the attacker and hitting his head with a wooden board, they managed to end the horror that hit the 19th arrondissement Sunday night. The perpetrator is now in police custody and the police are trying to reconstruct what happened and what motivated the attacker for his bloody murder.
Without the bravery of the three friends and normally slow steel globes, it could have been a lot worse. After all, the area was full of revelers from a popular film complex, tourists and families. Two British tourists were among the wounded
Fortunately for everyone, petanque player Boudjema Hamani and his two friends were ready to use their own weapons.
The petanque, a typical Gaulish pastime played by some 20 million Frenchmen in which a ball rolls slowly along the gravelly soil, is omnipresent in the Parisian courts in summer. It is popular with older people and has no reputation for danger, action or speed.
Until now.
In a surprise reaction at 11 pm, the friends – none of whom can be considered an elderly man – have pursued the attacker, who is Afghan, according to the authorities, and sprayed him with spheres of steel that weigh almost kilo. Thirty people were thrown at the attacker while he was trying to stab people with a 40-centimeter kitchen knife. At least one hit his head.
Hamani, who helped disarm and stop the knife, initially thought it was a normal bustle, maybe a fight, nothing particularly unusual.
"But some young girls and boys ran to us saying" be careful, be careful, he has a knife, "Hamani told The Associated Press.
It was when the cutler arrived on the Bassin de la Villette Canal that Hamani and his friends started launching unusual projectiles and all that they could find, until what happened. He loses balance and that his petanque companion Reda Smain a board of wood.
Smain then managed to snatch the knife from the attacker, his friends having been able to "block on the ground" until the arrival of police in plain clothes.
Smain told the French network BFMTV that he had hit the left arm of the attacker, who was holding the knife. "I jumped on the knife, I took it from his hand," he said. "Then I fell with him and knocked him out."
Paris petanque players were praised for their courage as the French authorities opened an investigation for murder. On Twitter, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb praised their "courage and responsiveness".
The Paris police said Monday that four of the victims were in serious condition, including one in a potentially deadly state.
"Of course it's scary. We are human beings, we are not Superman, so if we are stabbed, we will die … But we did not have time to think about it, "said Hamani before thinking.
"We had a weapon, like him."
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Associated Press editor Sylvie Corbet and video reporter Nicolas Garriga contributed to the report.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
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