Yvelines

The daily Le Parisien, in an in-depth report published Sunday, said the suspect had a history of contacts via social networks with two men notorious for the gruesome killing of a priest during Mass in 2016 in Saint-Etienne du Rouvray and the man who killed a police couple at their home in Yvelines, west of Paris, a month earlier.

A police union source said a squad from the elite CRS8 anti-riot unit was being deployed to Elancourt, the town in the Yvelines department west of the capital where Wednesday's crash occurred.

Wednesday's crash, which occurred in Elancourt in the Yvelines department west of the capital, happened just over two months after police shot and killed a 17-year-old of North African descent at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

Two more departments - the Yvelines west of Paris, and Savoie in the east - have activated low-level pre-alert "vigilance."

The ruling by the Paris Administrative Tribunal comes a day after another court in Versailles, near the capital, suspended a similar order to wear masks outdoors in the Yvelines region, deeming the mandate “an excessive, disproportionate and inappropriate infringement ... of personal freedom”.