A Tunisian beheads a woman and kills two more in a Nice church

French President Emmanuel Macron visits the scene of a knife attack at the Notre Dame church in Nice, France, on October 29, 2020. REUTERS / Eric Gaillard / Pool

NICE, France – A Tunisian man wielding a knife and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people in a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday before police Shoot him and take him away.

President Emmanuel Macron said France would deploy thousands more troops to protect important sites such as places of worship and schools as the country’s security alert was raised to its highest level.

Speaking outside the church, Macron said that France had been attacked “for our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief … we will give up any ground. “

The attack came just under two weeks after a high school teacher in a Paris suburb was beheaded by an 18-year-old attacker who was apparently outraged by the teacher displaying a box of the Prophet Muhammad in class.

The chief anti-terrorist prosecutor, Jean-Francois Ricard, said the suspect in Thursday’s attack was a Tunisian born in 1999 who arrived in Europe on September 20 in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunis that is the main landing point for the African migrants.

A Tunisian security source and a French police source named the suspect as Brahim Aouissaoui.

Ricard told a press conference in Nice that the man had entered the city by train early Thursday morning and made his way to the church, where he stabbed and killed the 55-year-old sexton and beheaded a 60-year-old woman.

He also stabbed a 44-year-old woman who fled to a nearby cafe where she raised the alarm before dying, Ricard said. Then the police arrived and confronted the attacker, still shouting “Allahu Akbar”, shot and wounded him.

“In the attacker we found a Koran and two telephones, the murder knife – 30 cm with a 17 cm edge. We also found a bag left by the attacker. Along with this bag were two knives that were not used in the attack, ”said Ricard.

The suspect is in the hospital in critical condition, he said.

The spokesman for the Tunisian counter-militancy court, Mohsen Dali, told Reuters that the police did not list Aouissaoui as a suspected militant.

He said that Aouissaoui left the country on September 14 by boat, adding that Tunisia had started its own forensic investigation into the case.

Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi said the attack was similar to the beheading by a Chechen man earlier this month near Paris of teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class on freedom. expression.

The attacks on Thursday, on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, came at a time of growing Muslim anger over France’s defense of the right to publish the cartoons, and protesters have denounced France in street demonstrations in several Muslim-majority countries.

Security alert raised

After the Nice attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex raised France’s security alert to its highest level.

The police, armed with automatic weapons, installed a security cordon around the church, which is located on Avenue Jean Medecin in Nice, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare on the French Riviera.

In Paris, the legislators of the National Assembly observed a minute of silence.

US President Donald Trump expressed his sympathy for the people of France after the attack. “The United States is with our oldest ally in this fight. These radical Islamic terrorist attacks must stop immediately. No country, France or any other country, can bear it for a long time! “Trump said in a Twitter post.

Condemnations for the attack also came from Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, whose President Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week criticized Macron and France for exhibits of the Prophet Muhammad.

Turkey’s presidential communications director Fahrettin Altun said that Islam cannot be used in the name of terrorism, adding: “We call on French leaders to avoid inflammatory rhetoric against Muslims and to focus instead , in finding the perpetrators of this and other acts of violence. “

The Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, said that “extremist acts” like the one in Nice “contravene all religions, while stressing” the importance of avoiding all practices that generate hatred, violence and extremism. ”

France, with the largest Muslim community in Europe, has suffered a series of attacks by Islamist militants in recent years, including 2015 bombings and shootings in Paris that killed 130 people and a 2016 attack in Nice in which A militant drove a truck through a seafront crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86.

A representative of the French Council for the Muslim Faith also condemned Thursday’s attack and called on all Muslims in France to cancel the celebrations of the Mawlid holiday which marks the Prophet’s birthday, as a sign of mourning and solidarity.

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