Three dead as woman beheaded in France, gunman killed in second incident
NICE, France (Reuters) – A
knife-wielding attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” beheaded a woman and killed two
other people at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday, 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 “Allahu Akbar”
(God is Greatest), 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 he was in hospital after a knife attack and 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 Holy Prophet Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) in a civics
class.
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 the phrase “Allahu Akbar” even 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 told reporters.
“Enough is enough,” he added.
“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.”
Reuters 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. Ambulances and fire service vehicles were also at
the scene.
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 Mohammad.
SOLIDARITY
President Emmanuel Macron is due
to visit Nice, Estrosi said.
In Paris, lawmakers in the
National Assembly observed a minute’s silence in solidarity with 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”.
Police said three people were
confirmed to have died in the attack and several were injured. The French
anti-terrorist prosecutor’s department said it had been asked to investigate.
A police source said a woman was
decapitated. French far-right politician Marine Le Pen also spoke of a
decapitation having occurred in the attack.
A representative of the French
Council for the Muslim Faith strongly 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.”
The holiday is the birthday of the
Prophet Mohammad, celebrated on Thursday.
Egypt’s al-Azhar, 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 Mohammad.
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 Mohammad to his pupils.
It was not immediately clear if
Thursday’s attack was connected to the cartoons, which Muslims consider
blasphemous.
In a comment on recent beheadings
in France, the Russian government said on Thursday it was unacceptable to kill
people, but also wrong to insult the feelings of religious believers.
France, with Europe’s largest
Muslim community, has suffered a string of Islamist militant attacks in recent
years, including bombings and shootings in 2015 in Paris that killed 130 people
and a 2016 attack in Nice in which a militant drove a truck through a seafront
crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86.