French police are waiting to interview the man suspected of ploughing a car into a group of soldiers as he recovers from being shot during his arrest.

The suspect has been named as Hamou Bachir Benlatreche, a 36-year-old Algerian national, legally resident in France and unknown to the security services. He is in a serious condition in hospital after he was shot while being apprehended on a motorway in northern France. Benlatreche was driving the rented black BMW car used in the attack in Levallois-Perret, on the outskirts of Paris.

Detectives, who have linked the car but not the driver to the incident that left three soldiers seriously injured, have been searching his home in a north-west suburb of the French capital to establish a possible motive for the attack. A police source told Le Figaro the suspect had a stable and legitimate job and appeared to be “perfectly unknown”. “He doesn’t appear to have been in any Islamist shadows,” a source told the paper. A police officer told Agence France-Presse the suspect, who was shot five times after ramming a police vehicle trying to force him to stop, was still in hospital in Lille and not able to be questioned as yet.(theguardian)…[+]

At least 55 people are feared to have drowned off the coast of Yemen after being forced from a migrant boat by smugglers in the second such incident in two days, the UN migration agency has said.

Five bodies were recovered during an International Organisation for Migration (IOM) beach patrol in Shabwa province, and about 50 more people were missing.

On Wednesday the IOM said 51 people had been “deliberately drowned” in a similar incident. Survivors told the IOM that the smuggler pushed about 120 people into the sea after he thought he had seen some “authority-type” figures off the Yemeni coast. The passengers’ average age was about 16, the IOM said. “The utter disregard for human life by these smugglers, and all human smugglers worldwide, is nothing less than immoral,” said William Lacy Swing, director general of the IOM. “What is a teenager’s life worth? On this route to the Gulf countries, it can be as little as $100.”

Yemen is in the midst of a protracted civil war and an outbreak of cholera, but migrants and refugees continue to arrive in their thousands, hoping to pass through and reach wealthy Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE.(theguardian)…[+]

About 700,000 eggs from Dutch farms implicated in a contamination scare have been distributed to Britain and some supermarket products have been withdrawn, the Food Standards Agency has said. The FSA said investigations into the fipronil incident in Europe suggested it was “very unlikely” that the eggs posed a risk to public health, but the number of contaminated eggs estimated to have reached the UK is far higher than the 21,000 first estimated. Products withdrawn include salads from Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda plus sandwiches from Waitrose and Morrisons.

The FSA added that some of the products made from these eggs will have had a short shelf life and will have already been consumed, but some were still within the expiry date and were being withdrawn by the businesses involved.

The FSA said in a statement: “The decision to withdraw these products is not due to food safety concerns, but is based on the fact that fipronil is not authorised for use in food producing animals. The Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland are committed to ensuring that food is safe, and that UK consumers have food they can trust. “We are reminding food businesses of their legal responsibilities which include informing the FSA or FSS and relevant local authorities immediately if they have any reason to believe that a food which they have imported, produced, processed, or distributed does not comply with food safety requirements.”

A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “The safety of our products is our priority. Our supplier has made us aware that two salad bowls, which contain egg, may include very small traces of fipronil. The FSA has advised that this is unlikely to pose a health risk, but we’re withdrawing these products from sale on a temporary basis as a precautionary measure. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.”(theguardian)…[+]