A 69-year-old man was taken into custody on Friday after he opened fire at a Kurdish community center and at other targets in central Paris, killing at least three people, the French authorities said.
Three other people were wounded in the shooting, one of them seriously, according to the Paris prosecutor, in the attack shortly before noon on Rue d’Enghien, a narrow street in the 10th Arrondissement of the French capital.
French officials said that the gunman had been arrested after shots were fired at a restaurant and at a hair salon as well as at the Kurdish community center, and that he had been taken to the hospital after being lightly injured.
“We don’t know exactly what his motivations were,” said Alexandra Cordebard, the mayor of the 10th Arrondissement, although Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, told reporters that the police were investigating a possible racist motive to the attack.
France was struck by a large-scale Islamist terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016, and, in the years that followed, by a string of smaller but deadly shootings and stabbings, often carried out by lone assailants. But those security concerns have loomed far less in recent years in France, and mass shootings remain rare.
The prosecutor’s office said that the identity of the suspect was still being verified, adding that it had opened a murder investigation.
Ms. Beccuau said the gunman had been involved in at least two other criminal cases. He was suspected of attacking people living in tents near Bercy, a neighborhood in the 12th Arrondissement of Paris. The man was detained after an investigation was opened in late 2021, but he was recently freed, Ms. Beccuau said.
Ms. Beccuau said the suspect had also been recently convicted in another case, but she did not provide details.
One witness, who was identified only as Ali, told the BFMTV news channel that he had been walking down the street when he heard gunfire and turned around.
“We saw people running left and right,” he said. He then entered the nearby hair salon, where three people were wounded, he told the news channel.
Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, thanked the police on Twitter for their “decisive response this morning during the terrible attack in the 10th” and expressed her condolences for the victims.
Ms. Cordebard said that there had been no particular security measures in place at or near the Kurdish community center.
“This neighborhood lives in perfect harmony, with a mix of communities living together,” she said.
The shooting occurred almost a decade after three Kurdish activists were killed in Paris, including Sakine Cansiz, a Kurdish separatist who was a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in 1978.
