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By Caroline Pailliez and Matthias Galante
PARIS / NICE (Reuters) – As he did every day, Vincent Loques, sexton of the Notre Dame church in the French city of Nice opened the doors around 8:30 am There were few people around; the first mass of the day was not to begin for another two hours.
But shortly after starting work Thursday morning, a Tunisian man armed with a knife entered the church and, within 20 minutes, cut the 55-year-old sexton’s throat, beheaded a 60-year-old woman, and in bad win. He injured a third woman who was 44 years old, according to prosecutors.
The sexton and the older woman were killed on the spot, while the younger woman managed to reach a cafe across the street, where she died of her injuries, France’s chief counterterrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said. later on Thursday.
The attacker was shot by police officers who detained him and is being treated at the hospital.
Witness testimony, mobile phone images, and officials’ accounts provided an initial picture of the events leading up to the attack, the attack itself inside the Neo-Gothic church, and the immediate aftermath.
The alleged attacker, named by French and Tunisian police sources as 21-year-old Brahim Aouissaoui, was caught on CCTV as he arrived at the Nice train station at 6:47 am (05:47 GMT).
According to a schedule provided by Ricard, the attacker remained at the station for 26 minutes, during which time he turned around and changed his shoes.
At 08:13, he set off to walk 400 meters to the church of Notre Dame, in a tree-lined square next to Nice’s main commercial thoroughfare.
He entered the church at 8:26 a.m., Ricard said, citing video surveillance evidence, and began his attack with a 12-inch-long knife.
When police later examined the scene, they found that the attacker had brought two spare knives that he did not use, along with a copy of the Quran and two telephones.
ALARM HIGH
The first anyone outside the church knew of the attack was at 8:54 a.m. when the 44-year-old fled a church side entrance onto Rue d’Italie, a street lined with cafes and shops. He came to one of the cafes and the alarm was raised.
At a nearby bakery also next to the church, someone ran in and asked the staff to call the police.
“I thought it was a joke, I didn’t believe it,” said one of the bakery employees, who spoke to French broadcaster BFMTV and said his name was David.
But when the person insisted, David said he walked the short distance to the corner of Rue d’Italie and Avenue Jean Medecin, where last year local authorities installed an intercom in front of the church that connects directly to the municipal police.
David said he pressed the intercom button and called the police. Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi, who attended the unveiling of the intercom last year, said that was how the police were first alerted to the attack.
David said police arrived at the scene in 30 seconds, as he returned to his bakery and lowered the blinds.
SCREAMS OF ALLAHU AKBAR
The first policemen on the scene were four officers from the Nice municipal force. They entered the church through the Rue d’Italie entrance and saw the attacker.
“According to police accounts, the man advanced towards them in a threatening manner, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,'” Ricard said. The term is Arabic for God is the greatest. Officers fired Tasers and then used side service weapons. Fourteen spent bullet casings were found at the scene.
In video footage obtained by Reuters, taken from a balcony across the street from the church, policemen with guns and tasers could be seen raised at the side entrance of the church, looking in. Shots were heard. It was not clear from the images what they were filming.
Images taken from the same balcony vantage point later showed a dark-haired man on an ambulance stretcher driving away from the church and into a waiting ambulance. Armed police surrounded the man on the stretcher, who was motionless.
A witness who observed the scene said the man on the stretcher was the knife attacker, but Reuters could not independently verify this.
Previously, witnesses said they heard shots coming from the street outside the church and said they believed the police were shooting at someone fleeing the church, but this was not confirmed by the prosecutor’s account.
Outside the church, parishioners searched for news about the victims.
Michele Malé, one of the parishioners, burst into tears. “We have just learned on television that our sacristan was killed,” he told reporters. “We are in a state of shock.”
A member of the local parliament appointed the sacristan Vincent Loques. The names of the other victims have not been made public.
The sacristan, a lay member of staff responsible for maintaining the church, had two children, said Gil Florini, a Catholic priest from Nice.
“He did his job as a sacristan very well. He was a very kind person,” Florini said.
(Additional reporting by Tangi Salaun, Sudip Kar-Gupta, and Jean-Michel Belot; written by Christian Lowe; edited by Alexandra Hudson and Daniel Wallis)
