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PARIS (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday that he respected Muslims who were shocked by cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but that that was no excuse for violence as his officials increased security after a knife attack on a French church that killed three people. this week.
An assailant screaming “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people in a church in Nice on Thursday, in the second deadly knife attack in France in two weeks with an alleged Islamist motive. .
The alleged assailant, a 21-year-old Tunisian, was shot by the police and is now in critical condition in a hospital.
Police said Saturday that another person was detained in connection with the attack. That person joins three others who are already in custody on suspicion of contacts with the attacker.
Macron has deployed thousands of soldiers to protect sites such as places of worship and schools, and ministers have warned that other militant Islamist attacks could occur.
The Nice attack, on the day Muslims celebrated the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, came amid mounting Muslim anger around the world over France’s defense of the right to publish cartoons depicting the Prophet.
On October 16, Samuel Paty, a school teacher in a Paris suburb, was beheaded by an 18-year-old Chechen man who was apparently outraged by the teacher showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in class during a civics lesson.
Protesters have denounced France in street demonstrations in several Muslim-majority countries, and some have called for boycotts of French products.
France, on the brink of anticipation of more possible attacks, was shocked Saturday night when a Greek Orthodox priest was shot and wounded in his church in the southeastern city of Lyon. But officials gave no indication that terrorism was suspected.
MACRON SCOPE
In an effort to rectify what he said were misunderstandings about France’s intentions in the Muslim world, Macron gave an interview to the Arab television network Al Jazeera that aired on Saturday.
In it, he said that France will not back down from violence and will defend the right to free expression, including the publication of cartoons.
But he emphasized that that did not mean that he or his officials supported the cartoons, which Muslims consider blasphemous, or that France was in any way anti-Muslim.
“So I understand and respect that people can be scandalized by these cartoons, but I will never accept that physical violence can be justified by these cartoons, and I will always defend the freedom in my country to write, think, draw.” Macron said, according to a transcript of the interview released by his office.
“My role is to calm things down, which is what I’m doing, but at the same time, it’s to protect these rights.”
THE JOURNEY OF THE SUSPECT
France’s chief antiterrorist prosecutor has said the suspect in carrying out the Nice attack was a 1999-born Tunisian who had arrived in Europe on September 20 on Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunis.
Prosecutors in the Sicilian city of Palermo, Italy, are investigating the man’s subsequent passage across the island, including people he may have been in contact with there, and are seizing phone records, judicial sources told Reuters.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that the suspect arrived in the Italian city of Bari in early October, on a boat used to quarantine the migrants, before leaving for Palermo, sources said.
(Reported by Sarah White and Michel Rose in Paris and Wladimiro Pantaleone in Sicily; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Ros Russel and Frances Kerry)
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