A high-speed police chase through Paris ended in a four-car pileup leaving 13 people injured including 10 officers.
Police attempted to stop the car after the driver allegedly ran a red light but when he refused it sparked an early morning chase through the south of the French capital.
The frantic car pursuit ended with the driver losing control of his car and smashing into a traffic light and three pursuing police vehicles hitting his vehicle.
The driver and two passengers were detained and taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
Footage shows the car smashing into a traffic light before being smashed into by one of the police vehicle pursuing .
While officers rushed out of their vehicle, a second police car hits into the back of the the first one and moments later a third police vehicle collides into the three cars.
During a police check at around 5:45am in the 14th arrondissement in southern Paris, the driver refused to comply with orders to stop, the police said.
Three police vehicles gave chase after the driver had run a red light, the public prosecutor’s office said.
The frantic car pursuit ended with the driver losing control of his car and smashing into a traffic light and three pursuing police vehicles hitting his vehicle
The driver and two passengers were detained and taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said
The horror pile-up left 13 people injured including 10 police officers
Prosecutors said they suspected the driver of being intoxicated at the time of the chase.
At the corner of Avenue du Maine and Boulevard du Montparnasse in the 15th arrondissement, the driver lost control of his car and crashed into a traffic light, prosecutors said.
‘The three pursuing police vehicles then crashed into his vehicle,’ added the prosecutor’s office.
Ten police officers received minor injuries and were briefly hospitalised.
Speaking to reporters, Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said all of them had been discharged from hospital by early afternoon, and he praised their ‘courage and composure’.
The three detained people are aged between 19 and 30, and two of them have police records, Nunez said, without providing other details.
Prosecutors said they suspected the driver of being intoxicated at the time of the chase
The Unsa-Police union posted a picture of the pile-up, with one police vehicle sitting on top of a badly damaged black car.
‘A chilling image that testifies to the violence of the accident that occurred in Paris,’ the union said on X, accusing the ‘reckless driver’ of endangering the lives of police and others.
Referring to the pile-up, Nunez said that the visibility during the car pursuit was ‘quite poor’.
Last year, 2,300 refusals to comply with police orders were recorded in the greater Paris region, said Nunez. Forty percent of such refusals take place at night, he added.
