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By Tangi Salaün and Eric Gaillard
PARIS / NICE, France (Reuters) – A knife-wielding attacker 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.
A defiant president, Emmanuel Macron, who declared that France had been the target of an Islamist terrorist attack, said he would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect important French sites such as places of worship and schools.
Speaking from the scene, he 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.”
And I say it again today very clearly: we are not going to give ground ”.
A police source told Reuters that police believed the attacker was a 21-year-old Tunisian national who had recently entered France from Italy.
The prosecutor of the Tunisian antiterrorist court launched a forensic investigation into “the suspicion that a Tunisian committed a terrorist operation abroad,” said Mohsen Dali, a spokesman for the court specialized in counter-militancy, in Tunisia.
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, state television reported that a Saudi man had been arrested in the Red Sea city of Jeddah after attacking and wounding a guard at the French consulate. The French embassy said he was in hospital after a knife attack, although his life was not in danger.
Within hours of the Nice attack, French police killed a man who had threatened passersby with a pistol in Montfavet, near the southern city of Avignon.
The French newspaper Le Figaro quoted a source from the prosecution as saying that the man was in psychiatric treatment and that they did not believe there was a motive for terrorism.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi said the attack in his city occurred at the Notre Dame church and was similar to the beheading earlier this month near Paris of the teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class.
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 HIGH
After the Nice attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex raised France’s security alert to its highest level.
Estrosi said the Nice shooter had repeatedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” even when he was detained by the police.
At around 9 a.m. (0800 GMT), a man armed with a knife entered the church and slaughtered the sacristan, beheaded an elderly woman and seriously wounded a third woman, according to a police source.
The sacristan and the old woman were killed instantly, the third woman managed to leave the church to a nearby cafe, where she died, Estrosi told reporters. So far none of the victims have been identified.
“The alleged knife attacker was shot by the police while in custody. He is going to the hospital, he is alive,” he said.
“Enough is enough. It is time for France to exonerate itself from the laws of peace to finally put an end to Islamofascism in our territory.”
Reuters reporters at the scene said police armed with automatic weapons had placed a security cordon around the church, which is located on Nice’s Jean Medecin Avenue, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare on the French Riviera. Ambulances and fire engines were also at the scene.
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 Islam cannot be used in the name of terrorism, adding: “We call on French leaders to avoid inflammatory rhetoric against Muslims and instead focus on in finding the perpetrators of this and other acts of violence. ” . “
SOLIDARITY
In Paris, the legislators of the National Assembly observed a minute of silence. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said the people of Nice “can count on the support of the city of Paris and the Parisians.”
A representative of the French Council for the Muslim Faith also condemned the attack. “In a sign of mourning and solidarity with the victims and their loved ones, I call on all Muslims in France to cancel all celebrations of the Mawlid holiday.” The holiday is the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which is celebrated on Thursday.
The Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, said that “extremist acts” such as the one in Nice “contravene all religions, while stressing” the importance of avoiding all practices that generate hatred, violence and extremism. “
France is still reeling from the murder of a Chechen-born man of schoolmaster Paty in a Paris suburb earlier this month. The attacker said that he wanted to punish Paty for showing his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
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.
(Report by Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris, Maher Chmaytelli and Raya Jalabi in Dubai, Angus McDowall in Tunis and Doina Chiacu in Washington; written by Christian Lowe and Giles Elgood; edited by Mark Heinrich)
