French Soldier Fires on Man Armed With Knife at Paris’s Louvre Museum

• French Soldier Fires on Man Armed With Knife at Paris’s Louvre Museum

French police cordoned off Paris’s Louvre museum after a soldier fired five shots at an assailant armed with a machete. The attacker is alive and has been taken into custody.

The attack happened after 10 a.m. in the staircase of the museum that connects an under ground shopping mall with the museum’s court yard, the Paris Prefecture’s Michel Cadot said at a press conference. The attacker cried “Allah Akbar,” Cadot said. The bag carried by the assailant didn’t contain explosives.

“The person was threatening,” Cadot told journalists.

France is in the middle of a chaotic election campaign in which public security has become one of the key issues. After more than 200 people were killed by terrorists in the past two years, the nationalist Marine Le Pen is leading polling for the first round of voting with a pledge to protect France’s borders and take the country out of the euro.

“It’s because he was attacked that his colleagues fired back,” police union spokesman Luc Poignant said on BFM TV. “It’s obvious that the others have to respond to protect his life.”