Woman beheaded in a Nice church
TERROR ATTACK
PARIS/NICE • As he did every day, the sexton of the Notre Dame church in the French city of Nice opened up the doors around 8: 30 a.m. There were few people around; the first Mass of the day was not due to start for another two hours.
But soon after he started work, a man armed with a knife entered the church and slit the throat of the 55-year-old sexton, beheaded a 60- year- old woman, and badly wounded a third woman, who was 44.
The sexton and the older woman died on the spot, the third woman managed to make it into a nearby cafe, but she died from her wounds, Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi told reporters.
Estrosi said the attack was similar to the beheading earlier this month near Paris of teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics class.
The church attacks, on the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad, came at a time of growing Muslim anger at France’s defence of the right to publish the cartoons, and protesters have denounced France in street rallies in several Muslim-majority countries.
A defiant President Emmanuel Macron, declaring that France had been subject to an Islamist terrorist attack, said he would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect important French sites, such as places of worship and schools.
Speaking from the scene, he said France had been attacked “over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief.”
“And I say it with lots of clarity again today: we will not give any ground.”
The suspected attacker, named by French and Tunisian law enforcement sources as Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, was captured on CCTV arriving at Nice railway station at 6:47 a.m.
A police source told Reuters the Tunisian national had recently entered France from Italy. He had arrived in Europe on Sept. 20 in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia that is the main landing point for migrants from Africa. Tunisia’s anti- terrorism court prosecutor began a forensic investigation into “the suspicion that a Tunisian committed a terrorist operation abroad,” Mohsen Dali, spokesman for the specialized counter-militancy court, said in Tunis.
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, state television reported that a Saudi man had been arrested in the Red Sea city of Jeddah after stabbing and injuring a guard at the French consulate.
Within hours of the Nice attack, French police killed a man who had threatened passersby with a handgun in Montfavet, near the southern city of Avignon.
France’s Le Figaro newspaper quoted a prosecution source as saying the man was undergoing psychiatric treatment, and that they did not believe there was a terrorism motive.
What happened in the initial moments of the attack inside the church, a neo- Gothic building in a tree-lined square in the centre of Nice, remains unclear.
But testimony from witnesses, mobile phone footage, and accounts from officials, offer an initial if incomplete picture of how the attack ended.
At some point during the attack, someone ran to a bakery next to the church, and asked staff to call the police.
“I thought it was a joke, I didn’t believe it,” said one of the staff in the bakery, who spoke to French broadcaster BFMTV and gave his name as David.
But when the person insisted, David said he walked the short distance to the corner of Rue d’italie and Avenue Jean Médecin, 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 button and the police arrived within 30 seconds. He went back inside his bakery and pulled down the blinds.
At some point during the attack, the knifeman came out of the church, according to Didier- Olivier Reverdy of police union Alliance Police Nationale.
“When the attacker came out, there was a kind of panic around the concourse” surrounding the church, said Reverdy. “There was blood visible.”
Anais Colomna was in the lawyer’s office where she works, next to the church, when her phone call was interrupted by gunfire.
“When I turned around, I saw that they ( the police) were firing at someone who was moving away from the church,” she told Reuters. The man police were firing at then disappeared from view, she said.
The first shots were fired at 8:58 a.m., according to local officials in Nice.
What happened next is unclear, but it appeared the attacker went back towards the church.
In video footage, shot from a balcony across the street, police officers with guns and Tasers raised, could be seen in the side entrance of the church, looking inside.
Gunshots could be heard. It was not clear what they were shooting at.
Estrosi said that, as police were detaining the attacker, “he kept shouting on a loop, ‘Allahu Akbar’.” The Arabic phrase means God is Greatest. The attacker carried on shouting the phrase even after he was shot and wounded by police, Estrosi said.
The attacker was detained by police at 9: 10 a. m., local officials said.
Outside the church a short while later, parishioners gathered to seek news about the victims.
Michele Malé, one of the parishioners, broke down in tears. “We just found out on TV that our sexton was assassinated,” she told reporters. “We’re in shock.”
The sexton — a lay member of staff responsible for the upkeep of the church — was in his late 40s or early 50s and had two children, said Gil Florini, a Catholic priest in Nice.
“He did his job as a sexton very well. He was a very kind person,” said Florini.
OUR SEXTON WAS ASSASSINATED. WE’RE IN SHOCK.