French police have arrested a man on suspicion of causing an explosion next to a synagogue.

On Sunday night, France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin praised the police’s “great professionalism” in apprehending the suspect who, according to French media, was shot after opening fire on officers.

On Saturday morning, a French police officer was injured in a bombing outside the Beth Yaakov synagogue in the seaside resort town of La Grande-Motte, close to Montpellier in southern France.

Two vehicles were found at the scene engulfed in flames, according to the European Jewish Press. Worshippers had not yet arrived at the synagogue for Shabbat services when the blast occurred.

Law enforcement officers stand in front of a synagogue following explosion in La Grande-Motte, south of France (Photo by PASCAL GUYOT/AFP via Getty Images)

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) said the incident showed “an attempt to kill Jews.”

The use of a gas canister “in a car at a time when worshippers are expected to arrive at the synagogue is not simply a criminal act,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told Agence France-Presse.

CCTV footage reportedly showed a suspect in a keffiyeh waving a Palestinian flag near the synagogue.

“Our thoughts are with the congregation at the Grande-Motte synagogue and all the Jews in the country,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.

“Everything is being done to find the perpetrator of this terrorist act and protect places of worship. The fight against antisemitism is a constant battle, that of the united nation,” he added.

Gérald Darmanin described the incident as “manifestly criminal,” adding, “I want to assure our Jewish fellow citizens and the municipality of my full support and say that at the request of President Macron, all means have been mobilised to find the perpetrator.”

Earlier this month, Darmanin said at a ceremony commemorating the terrorist attack at Chez Jo Goldenberg, a Jewish restaurant in Paris’s Marais district on August 9 1982 that the first half of 2024 saw 887 antisemitic incidents, almost triple the 304 documented in the same period of 2023.

Darmanin warned that antisemitism “no longer hides” and that “it is an insult to the dead, the wounded, the humiliated and our history.” He also noted that one suspect in the Chez Jo Goldenberg attack has ever been found.