[ad_1]
PARIS – French authorities said on Friday they had arrested a man suspected of being in contact with an assailant who killed three people in a church in Nice on Thursday, an attack that shook the country and reignited fears of terrorism as it the authorities blamed some foreigners. leaders for stoking hatred of France.
A French judiciary official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation, said the suspect, a 47-year-old man, had been arrested Thursday night, but did not provide further details. French security forces routinely use a wide field of action when arresting and questioning relatives, friends and contacts of suspects after an attack.
Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, said France faced a high-level terrorism threat and was being “a special target” because of what he called the country’s staunch defense of freedom of expression and secularism. Authorities placed the country at its highest level of terrorist threat in the hours after the attack.
Debates over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have strained France’s relations with some Muslim-majority countries since the beheading of a teacher in a Paris suburb by a Muslim this month.
In Thursday’s attack, a man entered the Notre-Dame basilica in Nice shortly after it opened in the morning and fatally attacked three people with a seven-inch knife. Two similar knives were found near her bag, which was left in the church.
Police confronted the assailant in the church as the attack unfolded, shooting and wounding him. The suspect, a Tunisian in his 20s who has not been identified, remains hospitalized.
It was not immediately clear how the second man arrested could be related to the attack or what contacts he had with the main suspect, who was not known to French police or intelligence services.
Darmanin, the interior minister, told RTL radio on Friday that the main suspect had arrived in Italy from Tunisia last month and then apparently traveled to France hours or days before the attack.
Italian authorities said the suspect arrived on the island of Lampedusa in a small boat on September 20 and was ordered to leave the country on October 9, but that they had received no warning from the Tunisian authorities that he posed a threat.
Luciana Lamorgese, Italy’s interior minister, told a press conference on Friday that the majority of the migrants who arrived in Italy this year were Tunisians: 11,195 people out of a total of 27,190. Tunisia’s economic crisis and social unrest caused by the pandemic have pushed increasing numbers of people to leave, he said.
One of the victims of Thursday’s attack, a 60-year-old woman, had her throat slit so deeply that it resembled a beheading, according to France’s top counterterrorism prosecutor.
Another victim, Vincent Loquès, a 55-year-old man who was a church sexton, also had serious throat wounds. The third victim, a 44-year-old Brazilian living in France, according to Brazilian authorities, escaped from the basilica but died shortly after from her injuries. She was identified in the Brazilian media as Simone Barreto Silva.
Darmanin also said that he had warned local security authorities across the country last Sunday of the increased security risks after a group close to Al Qaeda issued a statement calling for people to attack French targets, including churches and embassies.
In another attack on Thursday, an assailant with a knife wounded a security guard outside a French consulate in Saudi Arabia.
The assault in Nice bears similarities to the recent murder of Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old school teacher, near Paris. He was beheaded by an 18-year-old Muslim who was angry that Mr. Paty had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
Since Paty’s assassination, French authorities have waged a sweeping crackdown on those they characterized as Islamist extremists in France, carrying out dozens of raids, temporarily closing a major mosque and disbanding two groups they accused of “defending Islam. radical “and hate speech.
Following the attack, the response of French officials, especially President Emmanuel Macron’s promise that France would protect the right to caricature, has been denounced by some Muslim leaders. French officials are increasingly outraged by these verbal attacks.
Darmanin singled out some leaders for promoting “extremely strong calls to hatred” against France in recent weeks, including “absolutely scandalous” comments from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who has questioned Macron’s mental health.
On Thursday, in a tweet that was later deleted, Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, said that Muslims had the right to “kill millions of French for past massacres.”
Mr. Darmanin said: “We are at war, facing an enemy that is both an internal enemy and an external enemy. We are not at war against a religion, but against an ideology, the Islamist ideology ”.
And Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s foreign minister, said in Parliament on Thursday that France could not accept “disinformation and manipulation campaigns” against France by those who “portray our commitment to fundamental freedoms as an attack. to freedom of worship “.
The transition from “virtual hatred to real violence” is rapid, Le Drian said. But he also sent a “message of peace to the Muslim world.”
“France is not the country of contempt or rejection, it is the country of tolerance,” he said. “Do not listen to voices that seek to arouse distrust. Muslim religion and culture are part of our French and European history ”.
Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister, told France Inter radio on Friday that he did not like the use of cartoons of the prophet of Islam. “But I will be the first to defend those who made them and those who distribute them,” he said.
Nice, a city on the French Riviera near the Italian border, has been traumatized several times by terrorist attacks. In 2016, in one of the deadliest attacks in France, a Tunisian killed 86 people while driving a truck amid crowds that had gathered in the city to watch the Bastille Day fireworks.
Christian Estrosi, mayor of the city, told Europe 1 radio on Friday that he felt angry after the attack and urged France to change its constitution if necessary to pass strict anti-terrorism laws.
Just as the French are giving up certain freedoms due to the coronavirus pandemic (on Friday, the country entered a national lockdown that will last at least a month), they should be willing to do the same to stop terrorism, Estrosi said.
Éric Ciotti, a lawmaker representing the region that includes Nice, said authorities needed to establish a “French-style Guantanamo,” a reference to the US military base in Cuba where terrorism suspects are being held, in order to stop to the people who are in flag. by intelligence services as potential risks, but have not been convicted of any crime.
“Islam-fascism is a virus,” Estrosi said. “We have permanent bombs in our territory that could explode at any moment.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.
