PARIS (Reuters) - A man attacked and wounded six people at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris on Wednesday morning, leaving one with serious injuries, before being shot by off-duty police officers, authorities said. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told reporters the man attacked travellers with what looked like a home-made weapon at 0642 CET (0542 GMT) at the entrance and inside the station. Police had earlier said the man had used a knife or blade. Within a minute, off-duty police officers returning home after a night shift shot the attacker three times, Darmanin said. Gare du Nord, one of the busiest stations in Europe, is the arrival point of the Eurostar train from London and a major gateway to the north of Europe. In February 2022, police killed a man who attacked them with a knife at the Gare du Nord station. In October 2017, a man who stabbed two people at the Marseille train station was shot and killed by soldiers.

 

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ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Tigray forces, who fought a two-year war against Ethiopia’s federal government, began handing over heavy weaponry to the national army as part of an African Union-led peace process. The demobilisation of Tigray forces is seen as central to the Nov. 2 ceasefire agreement, alongside the restoration of services, resumption of humanitarian aid and withdrawal of Eritrean troops, who fought alongside Ethiopia’s army but were not party to the truce. The handover in the town of Agulae, around 30 km (18 miles) northeast of the regional capital Mekelle, was overseen by a monitoring team comprising members of the two sides and a regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

 

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LONDON (AP) — British counterterrorism police are investigating after border officers seized cargo contaminated with uranium at London’s Heathrow Airport. The Metropolitan Police force said Wednesday that “a very small amount of contaminated material was identified after routine screening within a package incoming to the UK” on Dec. 29. It said the force’s Counterterrorism Command is investigating. There have been no arrests.

 

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BERLIN (AP) — More than 244,000 people applied for asylum in Germany last year, and more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees came to the country looking for shelter, the government said Wednesday.The No. 1 country of origin for asylum-seekers was Syria, followed by Afghanistan, Turkey and Iraq. Ukrainian refugees don’t need to apply for asylum, because they immediately received temporary residency status.Compared to 2021, the number of asylum-seekers went up last year by 27.9%. Especially during the last three months of 2022, numbers increased as asylum-seekers tried to reach Germany through the Balkan route.

 

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BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia’s Vice President has said that her security team found more than seven kilos of explosives buried next to a rural road that leads to her home in the southwestern province of Cauca. She described the incident as an assassination attempt. Francia Marquez shared a police report on her Twitter account which says a drug-sniffing dog alerted to the bomb, which was made of ammonium nitrate, powdered aluminum and shrapnel, and that anti-explosives officers blew it up in a controlled explosion.