Knife attack in a church
Woman beheaded and two others killed by suspect shouting ‘God is Greatest’
A KNIFE-wielding attacker shouting religious slogans beheaded a woman and killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice yesterday, while a gunman was shot dead by police in a separate incident.
Within hours of the Nice attack, police killed a man who had threatened passersby with a handgun in Montfavet, near the southern French city of Avignon. He was also shouting religious slogans, according to radio station Europe 1.
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, state television reported that a Saudi man had been arrested in the Red Sea city of Jeddah after attacking and injuring a guard at the French consulate there. The French Embassy said the guard was in hospital after a knife attack but his life was not in danger.
Nice’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, said the attack in his city had happened in or near Notre Dame church and was similar to the beheading earlier this month near Paris of teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class.
Yesterday’s attacks, on the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, 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.
After the Nice attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex raised France’s security alert to its highest level and said the government’s response would be firm and implacable.
Estrosi said the Nice attacker had repeatedly shouted religious slogans even while being detained by police.
One of the people killed inside the church was believed to be the church warden, Estrosi said, adding that one woman had escaped from inside the church into a bar opposite the 19th century neo-Gothic building.
“The suspected knife attacker was shot by police while being detained. He is on his way to hospital, he is alive,” Estrosi said. “It’s time now for France to exonerate itself from the laws of peace in order to definitively wipe out Islamo-fascism from our territory.”
Journalists at the scene said police, armed with automatic weapons, had put up a security cordon around the church, which is on Nice’s Jean Medecin avenue, the French Riviera city’s main shopping thoroughfare.
The attack was also condemned by the European Commission, the Vatican, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Turkey, whose president Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week slammed France over displays of the Prophet Muhammad.
French President Emmanuel Macron visited Nice, and said that he would be stepping up the deployment of soldiers to protect key French sites.
In Paris, MPs in the National Assembly observed a minute’s silence for the victims. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said the people of Nice “can count on the support of the city of Paris and of Parisians”.
The French anti-terrorist prosecutor’s department said it had been asked to investigate. A police source confirmed a woman had been decapitated.
A representative of the French Council for the Muslim Faith condemned the attack. “As a sign of mourning and solidarity with the victims and their loved ones, I call on all Muslims in France to cancel all the celebrations of the holiday of Mawlid.”
Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the 1 000-year-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning, condemned the incident as a “hateful terrorist attack” and warned against “violent and hate speech” in a reference to the display of images in France of the Prophet Muhammad.
Estrosi said the victims had been killed in a “horrible way”.
“The methods match, without doubt, those used against the brave teacher in Conflans Sainte Honorine, Samuel Paty,” he said, referring to the teacher beheaded earlier this month in an attack in a Paris suburb.
France is still reeling from that killing by a man of Chechen origin, who said he wanted to punish Paty for showing pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his pupils.
France, with Europe’s largest Muslim community, has suffered a string of Islamist militant attacks.