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NICE: A knife-wielding man killed three people in a church in southern France on Thursday (October 29), practically beheading a 60-year-old woman in what President Emmanuel Macron called an “Islamist terrorist attack.” .
The 21-year-old Tunisian migrant, who had a copy of the Koran and three knives with him, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest) when he was approached by the police who shot and seriously injured him, the French anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-Francois Picard said at a press conference.
In a nearly half-hour frenzy at the Notre-Dame basilica in central Nice, the assailant used a 30-centimeter (12-inch) knife to cut the throat of a 60-year-old woman so deeply that she was practically beheaded. Picard said. He died inside the church.
The body of a man, a 55-year-old church employee, was found nearby inside the basilica, with his throat also slit.
Another woman, a 44-year-old woman who had fled the church to a nearby restaurant, died shortly after from multiple knife wounds.
A woman kneels next to a police car and cries in Nice after the attack. (Photo: AFP / Valery Hache)
The victims were “people attacked for no other reason than to be present in this church at the time,” Ricard said.
The attack, he added, was a reminder that “the deadly ideology of Islamist terrorism is very much alive.”
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi told reporters at the scene that the attacker “kept repeating ‘Allahu Akbar’ even while on medication” as he was taken to hospital.
POLICE AVOIDED A ‘HIGHER TOLL’
Ricard said the attacker was a Tunisian, born in 1999, who had arrived in Italy on September 20 and then in France on October 9.
In a bag left at the scene, investigators found two unused knives, and the prosecutor said the police who shot him had “undoubtedly avoided an even higher number.”
The killings, which occurred before the Catholic holy day of All Saints Sunday, prompted the government to raise the terror alert level to the highest level of “emergency” across the country.
Churches across France rang death orders, the traditional bell ringing to mark a death, at 3pm.
DRIVEN SCHOOL SAFETY
Macron, who quickly traveled to Nice, announced increased surveillance of churches by France’s Sentinelle military patrols, which will be reinforced to 7,000 troops from 3,000.
Safety in schools would also be increased, he said.
“Clearly, it is France that is under attack,” the president added, vowing that the country “will not renounce our values.”
French police at Notre-Dame de Nice Basilica in southern France, when a man with a knife killed three people. (Photo: AFP / Valery Hache)
France has been the target of widespread anger in the Islamic world after Macron promised to take the fight to the radicals after an extremist beheaded a history teacher on 16 October for showing students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a lesson in freedom of expression.
But some claim that Macron is unfairly targeting the five or six million Muslims in France, the largest community in Europe.
Several Muslim-majority countries have launched campaigns to boycott French products, while protesters burned the French flag and Macron posters while rallies were taking place in Syria, Libya, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.
Macron on Thursday urged people of all faiths to unite and not “give in to the spirit of division.”
FRANCE ON THE EDGE
Daniel Conilh, a 32-year-old waiter at Nice’s Grand Café de Lyon, a block from the church, said it was just before 9:00 am when “they shot themselves and everyone ran away.”
“A woman came straight from the church and said: ‘Run, run, someone has stabbed people,'” he told AFP.
French counterterrorism prosecutors are in charge of investigating charges related to a “terrorist murder”.
France has been on high alert since the January 2015 massacre in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo ushered in a wave of militant attacks that have killed more than 250 people.
READ: Summary: Knife attacks in France since 2015
Tensions have escalated since last month, when the trial was opened for 14 suspected accomplices in that attack.
The document marked the beginning of the court proceedings by republishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that angered millions of Muslims around the world, the same cartoons that the teacher Samuel Paty used as lesson material.
Days after the trial began, an 18-year-old from Pakistan seriously injured two people with a butcher knife outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices in Paris.
‘MESSAGE OF PEACE’
After Thursday’s attack, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad tweeted that “Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Twitter later deleted his post.
Thursday also saw a Saudi national wounding a guard in a knife attack at the French consulate in Jeddah, while police in the French city of Lyon said they had arrested an Afghan seen carrying a knife while trying to board a tram. .
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian delivered “a message of peace to the Muslim world” on Thursday, insisting that France is a “country of tolerance.”
Relatives of knife victims gathered in front of the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice. (Photo: AFP / Valery Hache)
In Nice, painful memories of an attack by militants during Bastille Day celebrations on July 14, 2016, when a man rammed his truck into a crowded promenade, killing 86 people are still fresh.
Abdallah Zekri, director general of the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM) denounced the attack on Thursday and urged French Muslims to cancel the festivities to mark Mawlid, or the birthday of the Prophet, which ends on Thursday, “in solidarity with the victims and their loved ones. ” .
