France mourns 3 killed during 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.
Meanwhile, this nation 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 previously said he acted alone.
Tunisian anti-terrorism authorities opened an investigation 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 recently were 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.
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, a judicial official who spoke on condition of anonymity said.
Issaoui’s mother, Qamra, 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 anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office.
She said she was surprised to hear her son was in France.
“You don’t know the French language, you don’t know anyone there, you’re going to live alone there, why, why did you go there?” she recounted telling him.
Dali said Issaoui was not flagged for radicalism and decided Sept. 14 to emigrate illegally to Italy — after a failed first attempt — and reached Nice the day before the attack.
Before Nice, Issaoui, who was born in 1999, arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa on Sept. 20, France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor said.
Dali said an online post asserted the attack was staged by a group called Al Mehdi of Southern Tunisia, previously unknown to Tunisian authorities.
French authorities aren’t commenting on the claim.
The attack was the third in less than two months that French authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists, including the beheading of a teacher who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a civics lesson after the images were republished by satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
The images deeply offended many Muslims, and protesters burned French flags, stomped on portraits of Macron or called for boycotts of French products at demonstrations Friday in several countries.
Nice Imam Otmane Aissaoui decried a “terrible act of terror, of savagery, of human insanity that plunges us into sadness, shock and pain” — and once again puts French Muslims in the spotlight.
The attacker “hit brothers and sisters who were praying to their lord,” he said. “It’s as if a mosque was touched. … I am deeply Christian today.”