Grenades thrown at mosque in France, a day after Charlie Hebdo attack

Paris: Paris: Mosques in two French towns were fired upon overnight, leaving no casualties, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Three blank grenades were thrown at a mosque shortly after midnight in the city of Le Mans, west of Paris. A bullet hole was also found in a window of the mosque.

In the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France, several shots were fired in the direction of a Muslim prayer hall shortly after evening prayers. The hall was empty, the local prosecutor said.

An explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in the eastern French town of Villefranche-sur-Saone on Thursday morning also left no casualties. Local prosecutors have described it as a "criminal act".

Earlier in the day, a woman police officer was killed and a street sweeper were shot and gravely wounded at the southern edge of Paris, in a pre-dawn attack. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the attack, which has not been linked to the assault on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people were killed yesterday.

In the Thursday shooting, he said the officer had stopped to investigate a traffic accident when the firing started. Paris police said the second victim was a street sweeper.

"There was an officer in front of a white car and a man running away who shot," said Ahmed Sassi, who saw the shooting from his home nearby.

These are the French cities where the attacks took place

France is on its highest level of alert after the deadly attacks at Charlie Hebdo's central Paris offices.

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