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PARIS / BRAZILIA (Reuters) – One of the victims of Thursday’s knife attack on a French church was able to stagger and raise the alarm before dying from his injuries.
Simone Barreto Silva, 44, a mother of three, moved to France from Brazil as a teenager, loved to dance samba and showed devotion to Jesus Christ.
“She crossed the street, covered in blood,” said Brahim Jelloule, manager of the Unik cafe, which is across the street from the church’s side entrance in the Mediterranean city of Nice.
Jelloule said her brother, who was working at the cafe at the time, and an employee, saw Silva and led her inside.
“To begin with, they couldn’t understand anything. She was still talking, saying there was someone inside (the church),” Jelloule said in an interview with the France Television station.
Silva was one of three people killed in the knife attack. The others were Vincent Loques, the 55-year-old sexton of the church, who had his throat cut, and a 60-year-old woman who was beheaded. She has not been named.
The alleged attacker, identified by prosecutors as Brahim al-Aouissaoui, from Tunisia, was shot and wounded by police who arrived at the scene when the alarm was raised. He is being treated at the hospital.
Silva was originally from Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, but when she was young she moved to France and studied at Nice Sophia Antipolis University, according to her Facebook profile. He trained as a chef, but had been working as a care assistant lately, French media reported.
The image on his Facebook profile had a picture of Jesus Christ and the words, in French: “I am the one who loves you.” He also published sentences in Portuguese.
Although he resided for a long time in France, he maintained his ties with Brazil. Her sister, Solange Barreto, also lives in France and helps organize an annual Brazilian cultural festival in Nice.
A musician friend of the deceased, percussionist Jorge Bezerra, told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo that Silva danced samba and had been to shows at Brasil Tropical, a Brazilian cabaret in Paris.
Solange Barreto updated her Facebook profile photo late Thursday to show a black rose and a black ribbon, symbols of mourning.
In a statement, Brazil’s Foreign Ministry said its embassy in Paris was providing assistance to the family of the deceased woman.
“Brazil expresses its firm repudiation of each and every one of the forms of terrorism, regardless of its motivation, and reaffirms its commitment to work to combat and eradicate this scourge,” the statement read.
“At this time, the Brazilian government expresses in particular its solidarity with Christians and people of other denominations who suffer persecution and violence because of their belief.”
(Reporting by Christian Lowe in PARIS and Pedro Fonseca and Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro; Edited by Janet Lawrence)
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