Beheaded woman dies in knife attack in French church

NICE, France: An attacker with a knife shouting “Allahu Akbar” 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), police said. and the authorities.

Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi, who described the attack as terrorism, said on Twitter that it had occurred in or near the city’s Notre-Dame church and that police had detained the attacker.

Estrosi said the attacker had shouted the phrase “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is the greatest,” and continued to shout it even after he was detained.

One of the people killed inside the church is believed to have been the church director, Estrosi said.

“The alleged knife attacker was shot by the police while in custody, on his way to the hospital, he is alive,” Estrosi told reporters.

“Enough is enough,” Estrosi said. “It is time for France to exonerate itself from the laws of peace to definitively eliminate Islamofascism from our territory.”

Police said three people were confirmed to have been killed in the attack and several were injured.

A police source said a woman was beheaded. French politician Marine Le Pen also spoke of a beheading in the attack.

Estrosi said the victims had been killed in a “horrible way.”

“The methods certainly coincide with those used against Conflans Sainte Honorine’s brave teacher, Samuel Paty,” he said, referring to a French teacher beheaded earlier this month in an attack in a Paris suburb.

Giving a toll that differs from French police and media figures, Estrosi said he could confirm that two people had died.

He said that a third person, a woman who was seriously injured, had tried to escape from inside the church and had fled to a bar in front of the building.

The French counter-terrorism prosecutor’s department said it had been asked to investigate the attack.

Reuters reporters at the scene said police armed with automatic weapons had placed a security cordon around the church, which is on Nice’s Jean Medecin Avenue, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare.

Ambulances and fire engines were also at the scene.

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The attack comes as France is still recovering from the beheading of high school teacher Paty by a man of Chechen origin.

The attacker had said that he wanted to punish Paty for showing students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics lesson.

It was not immediately clear what the motive for the Nice attack was, or if there was any connection to the cartoons, which Muslims consider blasphemy.

Since Paty’s murder, French officials, backed by many ordinary citizens, have reaffirmed the right to display the cartoons, and the images have been widely displayed at marches in solidarity with the murdered teacher.

That has sparked a torrent of anger in parts of the Muslim world, with some governments accusing French leader Emmanuel Macron of pursuing an anti-Islam agenda.