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PARIS: An attacker with a knife beheaded a woman and killed two other people in an alleged terrorist attack on a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday (October 29).
Here is a summary of the knife attacks in France since 2015.
2020
October 16: A teacher is beheaded near a school on the outskirts of Paris. The assailant is shot dead by the police.
Prosecutors say they are treating the incident as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization.”
Police say the victim had recently shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
September 25th: A man armed with a knife seriously wounds two people in an alleged terrorist attack outside the former offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
The attack takes place three weeks after the trial of the men accused of being complicit in the 2015 massacre of the newspaper’s staff.
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The scene of a knife attack in Romans-sur-Isere near Lyon, France, on April 4, 2020 (Photo: AFP / Jeff Pachoud)
April 4: In the southeast of Romans-sur-Isere, a riverside town, a 33-year-old Sudanese refugee embarks on a wave of stabbings in broad daylight, killing two people.
After the uproar, the attacker is arrested without a fight and prosecutors launch an investigation into “murder linked to a terrorist company” and “association with terrorist criminals.”
French police secure an area in Villejuif, near Paris, on January 3, 2020, after police shot and killed a man who tried to stab several people in a public park. (Photo: Reuters / Charles Platiau)
January 4: A man armed with a knife runs like crazy in a park south of Paris, killing a man who was walking with his wife and wounding two other people before being shot to death by police.
Counterterrorism investigators take over the investigation after evidence that Nathan C, 22, had recently converted to Islam.
2019
October 3: Mickael Harpon, a 45-year-old computer scientist with the Paris police intelligence gathering department, uses a kitchen knife and an oyster sheller to kill four colleagues.
His 30-minute rampage ends when an officer shoots him dead.
It turns out that Harpon had converted to Islam some 10 years earlier and had connections in the ultra-conservative Salafi movement.
An image taken from a video posted on May 13, 2018 by Amaq, the propaganda agency of the Islamic State group, shows Khamzat Azimov, who grew up in Strasbourg. (Image: AFP)
2018
May 12: Khamzat Azimov, 20, a naturalized Frenchman of Chechen origin, stabs a 29-year-old man to death in the busy Paris Opera district before being shot and killed by police.
The Islamic State (IS) group claims responsibility.
2017
October 1st: A 29-year-old Tunisian kills two young women with a knife at the main train station in the southern city of Marseille.
The soldiers shoot him dead and IS claims his attack.
The gruesome murder of an 85-year-old priest in the Saint-Etienne du Rouvray church traumatized the city. (Photo: AFP / Charly Triballeau)
2016
July 26: Two teenagers cut the throat of an 85-year-old priest in front of worshipers at a church in the western city of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
The 19-year-olds are killed by the police and their act claimed by the IS group to which they had sworn allegiance in a video.
June 13th: A 25-year-old uses a knife to kill a police officer and his partner at their home in Magnanville, west of Paris, in front of their young son.
He is killed by a police SWAT team, but has already reported the killings on social media on behalf of IS.
2015
June 26th: A 35-year-old attacker beheads his boss and shows his severed head, surrounded by two Islamic flags, in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, in southeastern France.
He commits suicide in his jail cell.
