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Nice (France) (AFP)
French President Emmanuel Macron vowed that his country would stand firm against religious extremists after a man armed with a knife killed three people in a church, in the country’s second attack attributed to Islamist terrorism this month.
France will not “renounce our values,” Macron said in Nice, after a Tunisian migrant made a nearly half-hour rampage with a 30-centimeter (12-inch) knife, aimed at people praying in the southern city of Notre- Give to me. basilica.
A 60-year-old woman died inside the church and the body of a man, a 55-year-old church employee, was found nearby, his throat also slit.
Another woman, a 44-year-old Brazilian who had fled the church to a nearby restaurant, died shortly after from multiple stab wounds.
“Tell my children that I love them,” he managed to say before his death, according to French cable channel BFM TV.
The attacker, who was shot and wounded by police, was identified as Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, who arrived in Italy last month and then traveled to France, judicial sources said.
Aouissaoui, who had a copy of the Quran and three knives with him, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest) when approached by police, who shot and seriously injured him, the French anti-terror prosecutor told a press conference. Jean-Francois Ricard.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi told reporters at the scene that the attacker “kept repeating ‘Allahu Akbar’ even while on medication” as he was taken to hospital.
The church killings follow the Oct. 16 beheading in a Paris suburb of history teacher Samuel Paty by an extremist after Paty showed students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad at a free speech lesson.
Macron defended cartoons and the right to mock religion, prompting widespread anger against France in the Islamic world and several campaigns in Muslim-majority countries to boycott French products.
– Police prevented a ‘higher toll’ –
Daniel Conilh, a 32-year-old waiter at Nice’s Grand Café de Lyon, a block from the church, said it was just before 9:00 am when “they shot themselves and everyone ran away.”
“A woman came straight from the church and said: ‘Run, run, someone has stabbed people,'” he told AFP.
French counterterrorism prosecutors are in charge of investigating charges related to a “terrorist murder”.
The police who shot Aouissaoui “undoubtedly avoided an even greater number of victims,” Chief Prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said, adding that investigators had found two unused knives in a bag at the scene.
The killings, which occurred before the Catholic holy day of All Saints Sunday, prompted the government to raise the terror alert level to the highest level of “emergency” across the country.
– France on high alert –
France has been on high alert since the January 2015 massacre in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo that ushered in a wave of jihadist attacks that have killed more than 250 people.
Tensions have escalated since last month, when the trial was opened for 14 suspected accomplices in that attack.
The document marked the beginning of the court proceedings by republishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that angered millions of Muslims around the world, the same cartoons that the teacher Samuel Paty used as lesson material.
Days after the trial began, an 18-year-old from Pakistan seriously injured two people with a butcher knife outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices in Paris.
In Nice, Macron announced increased surveillance of churches by France’s Sentinelle military patrols, which will be reinforced to 7,000 soldiers from 3,000.
Safety in schools would also be increased, he said.
But some claim that Macron is unfairly targeting the five or six million Muslims in France, the largest community in Europe.
Macron on Thursday urged people of all faiths to unite and not “give in to the spirit of division.”
– Painful memories –
After Thursday’s attack, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad tweeted that “Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Twitter later deleted his post.
Thursday also saw a Saudi national wounding a guard in a knife attack at the French consulate in Jeddah, while police in the French city of Lyon said they had arrested an Afghan seen carrying a knife while trying to board a tram. .
In Nice, painful memories of a jihadist attack remain fresh during Bastille Day celebrations on July 14, 2016, when a man rammed his truck onto a crowded promenade, killing 86 people.
Abdallah Zekri, director general of the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM) denounced the attack on Thursday and urged French Muslims to cancel the festivities to mark Mawlid, or the birthday of the Prophet, which ends on Thursday, “in solidarity with the victims and their loved ones. ” .
© 2020 AFP
