An attacker with a knife shouting “Allahu Akbar” beheaded a woman and killed two other people in an alleged terrorist incident at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday, police and officials said.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi, who described the attack as terrorism, said on Twitter that it had occurred in or near the church of Notre Dame, the largest in the city.
Estrosi said that the attacker had repeatedly yelled the phrase “Allahu Akbar”, or God is the greatest, even after being detained by the police.
One of the people killed inside the church is believed to have been the church director, Estrosi said, adding that a woman had tried to escape from inside the church and had fled to a bar in front of the 19th-century neo-Gothic building. “The alleged knife attacker was shot by the police while in custody, he is going to the hospital, he is alive,” Estrosi told reporters.
“Enough is enough,” Estrosi said. “It is time for France to exonerate itself from the laws of peace to definitively end Islamofascism in our territory.”
Reuters reporters at the scene said police armed with automatic weapons had placed a security cordon around the church, which is on Nice’s Jean Medecin Avenue, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. Ambulances and fire engines were also at the scene.
SOLIDARITY
French President Emmanuel Macron will visit Nice, Estrosi said.
In Paris, the legislators of the National Assembly observed a minute of silence in solidarity with the victims.
Police said three people were confirmed to have been killed in the attack and several were injured. The French counter-terrorism prosecutor’s department said it had been asked to investigate.
A police source said a woman was beheaded. French politician Marine Le Pen also spoke of a beheading in the attack.
A representative of the French Council for the Muslim Faith strongly condemned the attack. “In a sign of mourning and solidarity with the victims and their loved ones, I ask all Muslims in France to cancel all celebrations of the Mawlid holiday.”
The holiday is the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, which is celebrated on Thursday.
Estrosi said the victims had been killed in a “horrible way.”
“The methods certainly coincide with those used against Conflans Sainte Honorine’s brave teacher, Samuel Paty,” he said, referring to a French teacher beheaded earlier this month in an attack in a Paris suburb.
The attack comes as France is still reeling from the beheading earlier this month of high school teacher Paty by a man of Chechen origin.
The attacker had said that he wanted to punish Paty for showing students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics lesson.
It was not immediately clear if Thursday’s attack was related to the cartoons, which Muslims consider blasphemy.
Since Paty’s murder, French officials, backed by many ordinary citizens, have reaffirmed the right to display the cartoons, and the images have been widely displayed at marches in solidarity with the murdered teacher.
That has sparked a torrent of anger in parts of the Muslim world, with some governments accusing Macron of pursuing an anti-Islamic agenda.
In a comment on recent beheadings in France, the Kremlin said Thursday that it was unacceptable to kill people, but it was also wrong to insult the feelings of religious believers.
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