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PARIS / NICE (REUTERS, AFP) – A Tunisian man holding a knife and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people in a church in the French city of Nice before the police will shoot him and take him away. on Thursday (October 29).
French President Emmanuel Macron said France would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect important sites such as places of worship and schools. The nation’s security alert was raised to its highest level.
Speaking outside the church, Macron 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 with great clarity again today: we will not give any terrain “.
Chief anti-terror prosecutor Jean Francois Ricard later said the suspect was a Tunisian man born in 1999 who had arrived in Europe on September 20 on Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunis that is the main landing point for African immigrants.
A Tunisian security source and a French police source named the suspect as Brahim Aouissaoui.
Ricard told a press conference in Nice that the man had entered the city by train early Thursday morning and made his way to the church, where he stabbed and killed the 55-year-old sexton and beheaded a 60-year-old woman.
He also stabbed a 44-year-old woman who ran away to a nearby restaurant where she died minutes later, Ricard said, before police arrived and confronted the attacker, still shouting “Allahu Akbar,” and shot and wounded him.
“In the attacker we found a Koran and two telephones, the murder knife – 30 cm with a 17 cm edge. We also found a bag left by the attacker. Along with this bag were two knives that were not used in the attack, ”said Ricard.
The suspect is in the hospital in critical condition, he said.
Meanwhile, French police yesterday arrested a man armed with a long knife in the city of Lyon, in southeastern France, as he was about to board a tram.
The suspect, an Afghan citizen in his 20s wearing traditional Afghan clothing, “seemed ready to act,” said Pierre Oliver, mayor of the Second District of Lyon.
In Montfavet, near the city of Avignon, police said a man who had previously threatened passersby with a pistol was shot dead. According to the French radio station Europe 1, the man had shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest).
The spokesman for the Tunisian counter-militancy court, Mohsen Dali, told Reuters that the police did not list Aouissaoui as a suspected militant.
He said that Aouissaoui left the country on September 14 by boat, adding that Tunisia had started its own forensic investigation into the case.
The attack comes as France is still reeling from the beheading earlier this month of French high school teacher Samuel Paty by a man of Chechen origin.
The attacker had said that he wanted to punish Mr. Paty for showing the students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics lesson.
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.
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.
At a funeral for Paty on Wednesday last week, Macron said France would not “give up” on cartoons and vowed to address extreme Islamism in the country, which outraged many Muslim-majority countries, and some governments blamed Macron. pursuing an anti-Islam agenda.
Protests have broken out in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Gaza and Turkey.
In Saudi Arabia, a Saudi national wounded a guard yesterday in a knife attack at the French consulate in Jeddah city.
“The aggressor was detained by the Saudi security forces immediately after the attack. The guard was transferred to the hospital and his life is not in danger, “the French embassy in Riyadh said in a statement.
Malaysia has said it strongly condemns “acts of provocation” that would smear Islam, while Indonesian Vice President Ma’ruf Amin condemned Macron’s comments that he “generalizes to Muslims.”
But European governments have supported France, and the leaders of Germany, Italy and the Netherlands publicly expressed their solidarity with Macron.
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