A French paratrooper who fired his assault rifle into a crowd of spectators during a hostage-freeing exercise will face charges of grave negligence, prosecutors said yesterday.

A three-year-old boy and his parents were among the 15 civilians and two military personnel who were wounded in the shooting, which took place during an open day at the 3rd Marine Parachutist Regiment barracks on Sunday afternoon.

The boy was shot in the heart and arm and five other people were seriously wounded. Doctors who operated on the wounded visitors said it was fortunate that no one had been killed in the incident.

President Sarkozy, who visited the injured, promised punishment for any failures that led the sergeant to shoot live ammunition at the audience during a military exercise in the southwestern city of Carcassonne.

“This shows absolutely unacceptable negligence,” Mr Sarkozy said. “I will ensure a rapid and severe reaction. The whole chain \ will have to explain itself, not just one person.”

Prosecutors said that the sergeant, a veteran of an elite regiment who had an unblemished record, had mistakenly inserted a magazine of live rounds in his standard assault weapon after emptying a first magazine of blanks in the exercise, which he was conducting with seven other soldiers.

“We were watching an exercise and it happened when there was only about five minutes to go,” a witness said. “There were seven or eight soldiers with guns, with one of them in the middle of the public pretending to be a terrorist.”

Another witness, who was among the hundreds of visitors watching the demonstration of hostage-taking, said: “Suddenly people were falling — we thought it was part of the exercise, and then we saw blood. We saw a child of about 3 years really messed up, that really struck us. There were loads of children.”

Another member of the crowd described how he went to the aid of a child as bullets continued to whistle through the air.

“It’s a miracle that I wasn’t hit. I could hear them crackling where my head was just as I bent down,” he said.

As panic swept through the crowd an officer shouted a ceasefire order through loudspeakers and the exercise was halted.

Hervé Morin, the Defence Minister, said that he could not understand how an experienced soldier could confuse blanks and real rounds because the two munitions had different appearances and were packed into different-coloured magazines.

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