Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
2nd man arrested in French church attack
Officials looking into connection between suspect and Tunisian accused in killings
PARIS — French authorities said Friday that they had arrested a man suspected of being in contact with an assailant who killed three people at a church in Nice on Thursday, an attack that rattled the country and reignited fears of terrorism as officials blamed some foreign leaders for stoking hatred of France.
An official in the French judiciary, who was not authorized to speak publicly on a continuing investigation, said that the suspect, a 47-year-old man, had been arrested Thursday night but did not provide further details.
Gerald Darmanin, the interior minister, said that France faced a high- level threat of terrorism and was being “particularly targeted” because of what he called the country’s staunch defense of freedom of expression and secularism. Authorities placed the country on its highest terrorism threat level in the hours that followed the attack.
Debates about cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have strained France’s relations with some Muslim-majority countries since the beheading of a teacher in a Paris suburb by a Muslim man this month.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Muslims, from Pakistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian territories, poured out of prayer services to join anti-France protests on Friday, as the French president’s vow to protect the right to caricature the Prophet Muhammad continues to roil the Muslim world.
In Thursday’s attack, a man entered the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice shortly after it opened in the morning and fatally attacked three people with a 7-inch knife. Two similar knives were found near his bag, which was left in the church.
Police confronted the assailant at the church while the attack was in progress, shooting and wounding him. The suspect, a Tunisian man in his early 20s who has not been identified, is still hospitalized.
It was not immediately clear how the second arrested man might be connected to the attack or what contacts he had with the main suspect, who was not known to French police or intelligence services.
Darmanin told RTL radio Friday that the main suspect had arrived in Italy from Tunisia last month and then apparently traveled on to France hours or days before the attack.
One of the victims in Thursday’s attack, a 60-year-old woman, had her throat cut so deeply that it was akin to a decapitation, according to France’s top anti-terrorism prosecutor.
Another victim, Vincent Loques, a 55-year-old man who was the church’s sacristan, also had serious throat wounds. The third victim — a 44-yearold Brazilian woman living in France, according to Brazilian authorities — escaped the basilica but died of her wounds shortly afterward. She was identified in the Brazilian media as Simone Barreto Silva.
The assault in Nice bore similarities to the recent killing of Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old schoolteacher, near Paris. He was decapitated by an 18-yearold Muslim man who was angered that Paty had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
Since Paty’s killing, French authorities have undertaken a broad crackdown against what they characterized as Islamist extremists in France, conducting dozens of raids, temporarily closing a major mosque and disbanding two groups that they accused of “advocating radical Islam” and hate speech.
In the aftermath of the attack, the response by French officials — especially President Emmanuel Macron’s vow that France would protect the right to caricature — has been denounced by some Muslim leaders. French officials have grown increasingly angered over those verbal attacks.
Darmanin singled out some leaders for promoting “extremely strong calls to hatred” against France over the past few weeks, including “absolutely scandalous” comments by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who has questioned Macron’s mental health.
On Thursday, in a tweet that was later removed, Mahathir Mohamad, a former prime minister of Malaysia, said that Muslims had a right to “kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Darmanin said: “We are at war, facing an enemy that is both an internal enemy and an external enemy. We are not at war against a religion, but against an ideology, the Islamist ideology.”
Demonstrations in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad turned violent Friday as some 2,000 people who tried to march toward the French Embassy were pushed back by police firing tear gas and beating protesters with batons. Crowds of Islamist activists hanged an effigy of Macron from a highway overpass after pounding it furiously with their shoes.
In the eastern city of Lahore, an estimated 10,000 followers of the radical Islamic Tehreek-e-Labbaik party took to the streets.
Information for this article was contributed by Aurelien Breeden of The New York Times; and by Isabel Debre, Asim Tanveer, Munir Ahmed,Tameem Akhgar, Noha ElHennawy, Joseph Krauss, Julhas Alam, Elias Meseret, Zeina Karam, Robert Badendieck and Fares Akram of The Associated Press.