Paris police open fire on car at Tour de France

Updated: Police in Paris this morning opened fire on a vehicle after it was driven through barriers set up for this afternoon’s finale of the Tour de France.

Officers on the Champs Elysees opened fire on the auto in a bid to stop it but it drove away.

The dark-coloured vehicle tried to go through the barricades around 8:00 a.m., but the location near the finish line of the Tour de France appears to have just been a coincidence.

A police official told the Associated Press they believe the car’s driver likely was trying to avoid submitting to a police check after leaving one of the area’s ritzy nightclubs.

The Tour de France ends Sunday with Stage 21 finishing down the Champs-Élysées, the best-known street in Paris, which runs from Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. Attacks on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery market killed 20 people, including the three attackers. “It wasn’t intended at the Tour de France, it’s not terror, it’s a standard refusing to conform, as you can find many every day”, a regulate endorsed explained Reuters.

On rain-soaked roads that caused numerous spills in the women’s race on the Champs-Elysees before the men rode in, the exhausted riders didn’t bother racing for much of the largely flat 110-kilometer (68-mile) final stage from Sevres, in the French capital’s southwest.

No officers were injured, he said.