PARIS (AFP) – French prosecutors said yesterday they had opened a murder probe after a motorist ran over a cyclist following an altercation in the heart of Paris, as tensions rise in the battle for street space in the congested capital.
Witnesses said the driver, 52, appeared to deliberately target the cyclist who died at the scene near the Madeleine in the capital’s wealthy 8th district on Tuesday.
According to daily Le Parisien, quoting witnesses, the driver at the wheel of a SUV hit the cyclist with his car, and then drove over him, crushing his body under the heavy vehicle.
The cyclist, 27, went into cardiac-respiratory arrest. Efforts by emergency services rushing to the scene to save him failed.
“It was a bloodbath,” said Yoann, who was among the first people to try to assist the cyclist, according to Le Parisien.
The driver, whose teenage daughter was also in the car, was arrested on the spot.
Earlier, the motorist and the cyclist were seen having an angry dispute by the side of the road, and then appeared to continue their separate journeys before the SUV drove straight at the cyclist.
Police have been tasked with probing the incident for murder.
District mayor Jeanne d’Hauteserre told Le Parisien that she saw “witnesses sitting on the pavement, in shock” when she arrived at the scene on Tuesday. “This was such a violent act,” she said.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said that “it is unacceptable to die in this day and age while cycling in Paris, at 27 years old”.
Hidalgo, a Socialist who has been running city hall for over a decade, is the driving force behind an ambitious initiative to turn Paris into a cycling-friendly city with the aim of making it “100-per-cent bikeable” by 2026.
Already Paris is now ranked as one of the world’s dozen or so most bike-friendly cities since getting hundreds of kilometres of designated cycling paths.
Cyclists also get to run some red lights so long as there are no pedestrians, and can take one-way streets in the opposite direction from cars.
Much of the Paris thoroughfare rue de Rivoli is now reserved for biking, and city hall has promised to turn the iconic Place de la Concorde over to bikes and pedestrians soon. But the new space accorded to bicycles has often come out of roads previously used entirely by motorists, many of whom resent the change.
