France mourns three killed in church attack, tightens security

NICE, France — Mourners lit candles and prayed silently Friday to honor three people killed in a knife attack at a church, as France heightened security at potential targets at home and abroad amid outrage over its defense of the right to publish cartoons mocking the prophet of Islam.

The attacker, who recently arrived in Europe from Tunisia, was hospitalized with life-threatening wounds, and investigators in France and his homeland are looking into his motives and connections, though authorities had previously said he acted alone. Tunisian antiterrorism authorities opened an investigation Friday into an online claim of responsibility by a person who said the attack on the Notre Dame Basilica in the Mediterranean city of Nice was staged by a previously unknown Tunisian extremist group.

From Pakistan to Russia and Lebanon, Muslims held more protests Friday to show their anger at caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were recently republished in a French newspaper as well as at French President Emmanuel Macron’s staunch defense of that decision and strong stance against political Islam.

Macron’s government stood firm, and called up thousands of reserve soldiers to protect France and reinforce security at French sites abroad. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that the country is “at war” with Islamist extremists, and a conservative lawmaker for the Nice region called for a “French-style

Guantanamo” to lock up terrorist suspects.

Many French Muslims denounced the killings, while warning against stigmatizing the country’s peaceful Muslim majority.

While investigators sought to develop a picture of the attacker, identified as Ibrahim Issaoui, they detained a second suspect, a 47-year-old man believed to have been in contact with Issaoui the night before, according to a judicial official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be named.

Issaoui’s mother told Tunisian investigators that her son led a “normal life” for his age, drinking alcohol and dressing casually, and started praying two years ago but showed no suspicious activity, said Mohsen Dali, a spokesman at the Tunisian antiterrorism prosecutor’s office.