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A woman was beheaded by an attacker with a knife who also killed two other people in a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday, police said, in an incident that the city’s mayor described as terrorism.
Mayor Christian Estrosi said on Twitter that the knife attack had occurred in or near the city’s Notre Dame church and that police had detained the attacker.
Police said three people were confirmed to have been killed in the attack and several were injured.
A police source said a woman was beheaded. French politician Marine Le Pen also spoke of a beheading in the attack.
The French counter-terrorism prosecutor’s department said it had been asked to investigate the attack.
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.
The attack comes as France is still reeling from the beheading earlier this month of French high school teacher Samuel Paty in Paris by a man of Chechen descent.
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 what the motive for the Nice attack was, or if there was any connection 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 wave of anger in parts of the Muslim world, with some governments accusing French leader Emmanuel Macron of pursuing an anti-Islam agenda. – Reuters
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