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PARIS: As he did every day, the sacristan of the church of Notre Dame in the French city of Nice opened the doors around 8.30 am.
There were few people around; the first mass of the day was not to begin for another two hours.
But around 9 a.m., a man armed with a knife entered the church and slaughtered the sacristan, partially beheaded an elderly woman and seriously wounded a third woman, according to a police source.
The sacristan and the old woman were killed on the spot, the third woman managed to leave the church to a nearby cafe but died from her injuries, Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi told reporters at the scene.
So far none of the victims have been identified.
What happened in the opening moments of the attack inside the church, a neo-Gothic building on a tree-lined square in the center of Nice, remains unclear.
But witness testimony, cell phone footage and officials’ accounts provide an initial, if incomplete, picture of how the attack ended.
At some point during the attack inside the church, someone ran to a bakery next to the church and asked the staff to call the police.
“I thought it was a joke, I didn’t believe it,” said one of the bakery employees, who spoke to French broadcaster BFMTV and said his name was David.
But when the person insisted on calling the police, David said he walked the short distance to the corner of Rue d’Italie and Avenue Jean Medecin, where last year local authorities installed an intercom in front of the church that connects directly to the municipality. police.
David said he pressed the intercom button and called the police.
Mayor Estrosi, who had attended the intercom’s unveiling last year, said that was how police were first alerted to the attack.
David said police arrived at the scene in 30 seconds, as he returned to his bakery and lowered the blinds.
Police arrived at 9:10 a.m., according to a police spokesman, 10 minutes after the attack began.
Blood and panic
At some point during the attack, the cutler left the church, according to Didier-Olivier Reverdy of the Alliance Police Nationale police officers union.
“When the attacker came out, there was a kind of panic on the esplanade surrounding the church,” Reverdy said.
“There was visible blood.”
Anais Colomna was in the lawyer’s office where she works, next to the church, when her phone call was interrupted by the sound of gunshots.
“When I turned around, I saw (the police) shooting at someone who was walking away from the church,” he told Reuters.
The man the police were shooting disappeared from sight, he said.
What happened next is unclear, but it appears that the attacker returned inside the church.
In video footage obtained by Reuters, taken from a balcony across the street from the church, policemen with pistols and tasers could be seen raised at the side entrance of the church, looking in.
Shots were heard.
It was not clear from the images what they were filming.
Estrosi said that while police detained the attacker, “he kept shouting in a circle, ‘Allahu Akbar.’
The Arabic phrase means God is the greatest.
The attacker kept shouting the phrase even after police shot and wounded him, Estrosi said.
Images taken from the same balcony vantage point later showed a dark-haired man on an ambulance stretcher being pulled out of the church’s side entrance and into a waiting ambulance.
Armed police surrounded the man on the stretcher, who was motionless.
A witness who observed the scene said the man on the stretcher was the knife attacker, but Reuters could not independently verify this.
Outside the church a short time later, parishioners gathered to seek news about the victims.
Michele Male, one of the parishioners, burst into tears.
“We have just learned on television that our sacristan was killed,” he told reporters.
“We are in a state of shock.”
The sacristan, a lay member of staff responsible for maintaining the church, was in his 40s and 50s and had two children, said Gil Florini, a Catholic priest from Nice.
“He did his job as a sacristan very well. He was a very kind person, ”said Florini.
