THEY WILL NOT WIN

President Macron vows to beat Islamist extremism

FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron vowed to win the war on Islamist extremism, as it was revealed that the woman who was beheaded in the Nice terror attack used her dying breath to beg her fellow worshippers to tell her children she loved them.

As France, and the whole world, reeled in horror at the unspeakable actions of 21year-old Tunisian terrorist Brahim Aoussaoui – who killed three people inside Nice’s Notre Dame Basilica before being shot and wounded by police – investigators were still trying to piece together how it happened.

Counter-terrorism officers were set to interrogate Aoussaoui, who decapitated the 60-year-old woman and then slit the throat of Vincent Loques, a 45-year-old father and a church volunteer, before fatally stabbing a second woman, also in her 40s.

This woman managed to stagger out of the church for help, but died moments later.

“Tell my children that I love them,” were the beheaded woman’s last words.

Aoussaoui had arrived at

Nice’s main railway station at 7am on Thursday (local time), police CCTV footage showed.

He entered the basilica, a 19th-century Gothic edifice on the Ave Jean Medecin, when the sexton opened it at about 8.30am. No service had begun but people entered the cathedral to pray, just three days before All Saints’ Day.

As he slashed at his victims, shouting “Allahu Akbar” over and over again, someone ran from the church to a bakery next door and raised the alarm.

Armed police were on the scene in a minute. Aoussaoui then came out of the church, according to Didier-Olivier Reverdy of the police officer’s union Alliance Police Nationale. “There was a kind of panic around the concourse” of the church, he said. “There was blood visible.”

Officers opened fire and Aoussaoui moved back towards the church. He was then hit by at least two rounds and fell, witnesses said.

Among the torrent of violent online threats against France and French people this week – following Mr Macron’s public condemnation of Islamic extremists – terror group al-Qaeda ordered its followers to attack French churches.

Questions have now been raised about how Aoussaoui, who only arrived in Europe just a few weeks ago, was able to carry out the massacre.

Mr Macron declared that France was “under attack” but vowed that the country “will not give up on our values” in what he called an “Islamist terrorist attack”.