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PARIS (Reuters) – Two more men have been arrested in connection with a knife attack that left three dead in a church in Nice, bringing the number of people in custody to six as investigators analyze the last known contacts of the alleged assailant, a source French police said.
The latest arrests took place on Saturday, the source said.
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 attacker, a 21-year-old Tunisian, was shot by the police and is now in critical condition in a hospital.
The most recent arrests in the case involved two men from the city of Grasse, near the southern coast of France near Nice, BFM TV reported.
France’s chief counter-terrorism prosecutor has said the man suspected of carrying out the Nice attack arrived in Europe on September 20 on Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunis.
Investigators in Italy are also intensifying investigations into the movements and contacts of the alleged assailant on the island of Sicily. They believe he may have spent time there after going from Lampedusa to Bari in early October on a boat used to quarantine migrants, judicial sources said.
In Bari, he is believed to have received an expulsion order forcing him to leave Italy within a week, judicial sources said. Investigators are looking into the possibility that the alleged attacker remained in the Sicilian city of Alcamo for a period of 10 days, the sources added.
(Information from Sarah White and Nicolas Delame, Additional information from Wladimiro Pantaleone in Palermo; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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