The police in Paris shot and arrested a man who attacked and injured six people with a homemade bladed weapon early on Wednesday at the Gare du Nord, one of the capital’s busiest train stations, the French authorities said.
The motive for the assault was not immediately clear, but none of the injuries were expected to be life-threatening and the French authorities were not treating the episode as a terrorist attack.
Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister, said that at 6:42 a.m., an “extremely threatening individual” had stabbed several bystanders in front of the station before continuing inside, in what appeared to be a random attack during the commuter rush.
Border police who were stationed at the Gare du Nord, as well as off-duty officers who were armed and present at the scene, responded within a minute, Mr. Darmanin said. Two of the police officers fired three shots at the suspect and subdued him, he said.
The suspect was arrested and hospitalized with serious injuries, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office, which said it had opened a criminal investigation for attempted murder.
The attack injured six people, including one of the border police officers. Five were lightly wounded, and the sixth sustained more serious injuries, Mr. Darmanin said.
Gare du Nord, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, is one of the largest transit hubs in the French capital, with service to northern France and beyond, along with a Eurostar terminal for travelers heading to Britain.
“Without the extremely fast police response there would certainly have been deaths,” Mr. Darmanin told reporters at the station, which the police had partially cordoned off but was otherwise functioning normally.
Mr. Darmanin said the suspect did not have any papers on him during his arrest and that investigators were working to identify him. Mr. Darmanin said it was unclear exactly what kind of bladed weapon the assailant had used but that it appeared to be “something that he might have crafted himself,” rather than a standard knife.
The Twitter account of TER Hauts-de-France, a regional branch of France’s national railway serving northern France, said that the assailant “was brought under control, emergency services intervened and the person was taken away.”
The police established a security perimeter and train traffic was disrupted, “but the station is still being used normally,” the account added.
The attack came nearly three weeks after a gunman killed three people and wounded three others at a Kurdish community center, a hair salon and a restaurant in central Paris in what French officials said was a racially motivated attack against foreigners.
The suspect in that case, a 69-year-old man who told the police he had a “pathological” hatred of foreigners, was indicted on charges of murder and attempted murder with a racist motive. He remains in custody.
France was struck by large-scale Islamist terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016, followed by a string of smaller but still deadly shootings and stabbings in subsequent years, often carried out by lone assailants.
While terrorist attacks have receded from the headlines in France, the authorities say the threat is still high and that the police and intelligence services regularly foil plots. Mr. Darmanin said last month that the authorities had thwarted 39 Islamist attacks and nine far-right attacks since 2017.
