July 15, 2002	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 4, 1423

PARIS, July 14: A neo-Nazi militant was arrested in Paris on Sunday, after firing a rifle near President Jacques Chirac at the traditional Bastille Day parade, in what his wife described as an attempted assassination.

Maxime Brunerie, 25, was standing in the crowd at the Arc de Triomphe when he produced a .22 rifle from a brown guitar-case and fired one shot before being overpowered by police and led away.

Chirac, 69, had passed by moments before in an open-top vehicle at the start of the military march-past. It was not clear if the president was aware of the incident nor if he had been in serious danger.

“I was watching the parade. Chirac was going by in his car when I felt the crowd moving to my right. Then I saw, two or three metres away, a man aiming in the direction of the president,” said Mohamed Chelali, 50.

“Someone hit the gunman’s hand and I grabbed a part of the weapon, and some metal bit of it fell off. A third person kept it pointed upwards,” Chelali, a Canadian tourist, said after being interviewed by police.

Police said Brunerie — a student and part-time chauffeur from the southern Paris suburb of Evry — was “known to belong to neo-Nazi and hooligan movements.” Officials said he was a member of the far-right student group GUD and had links to skinhead groups.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Brunerie was a “militant of the extreme-right, known for his violence and with a police record.”

Asked whether there had been an attempt on her husband’s life, Chirac’s wife Bernadette said “Yes, it’s clear.”

The right-wing Chirac was re-elected head of state in May, and with his supporters now controlling parliament he is one of Europe’s most powerful politicians.

After the incident, the parade down the Champs Elysees continued unaffected, with Franco-American relations the central theme of the commemoration.

A squad of 170 cadets from the US military academy at West Point took the lead, and a fire-engine from the New York Fire Department drew warm applause. A detachment of New York fire-fighters — as well as relatives of some who died on Sept 11 — were among the guests of honour at the garden-party.

The July 14 celebrations mark the fall of the Bastille prison in Paris at the start of the French revolution in 1789. Altogether some 4,000 soldiers took part, as well as 90 aircraft, including some that flew recently in operations over Afghanistan.

The parade took place at a time of heightened concern about the level of military spending in France, with Defence Minister Michelle Alliot-Marie warning on Sunday, that half of the country’s tanks and helicopters are currently out of service because of a lack of spare parts.

Chirac has promised to devote new resources to the armed forces, whose budget has fallen to 1.8 per cent of Gross Domestic Product compared to 2.5 per cent in Britain and 3.5 per cent in the US. An extra 908 million euros was made available last week by the new centre-right government.—AFP