A knife-wielding attacker beheaded a woman in Nice, France, on Thursday morning — one of three people killed inside a church.
The attack happened at the Notre-Dame church. Not long after, several apparently related attacks took place.
A police source speaking with the Reuters news agency said one of the three people killed had been decapitated. The BBC said that a woman had been “virtually decapitated.”
France’s Le Monde newspaper reported that the other two casualties were a man and another woman.
Christian Estrosi, the city’s mayor, said on Twitter that the attacker had been arrested and one of the people killed was a church warden.
REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
Estrosi also said the incident appeared to be a terror attack.
“I confirm that everything suggests a terrorist attack in the Notre-Dame basilica,” he tweeted, and linked the attack to what he called “Islamo-fascism.”
A source in French counterterrorism policing — who did not have permission to discuss the case publicly — told Insider the attacker shouted about cartoons before he attacked the victims at about 9 a.m.
The attack followed the October 16 beheading of a teacher in Paris who had shown his class images depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
Estrosi, the mayor, told reporters that the attacker had “repeated endlessly ‘Allahu akbar’ when he was being treated at the scene,” the BBC reported. (“Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “God is greatest.”)
He said the suspect was shot by police and brought to the hospital alive, an account confirmed by Insider’s police source.
French President Emmanuel Macron visited the scene Thursday.
“Very clearly, it’s France that has been attacked,” he said. He described France, and particularly its Catholics, as “under threat.”
Islamist terror and the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad has long been a controversial issue in France, and prompted a terror attack in 2015 on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which printed cartoons of Muhammad.
The trial of 14 people suspected of helping with that attack is underway in France.
The teacher killed in Paris, Samuel Paty, had shown his class Charlie Hebdo images of Muhammad, according to the Guardian. French prosecutors said that his death was an act of revenge for this.
Images of Muhammad are considered blasphemous in Islam and have prompted killings previously.
After the attack on Paty, Macron pledged to take a tough stance against radical Islam.
He said Paty “was killed because Islamists want our future” but that France would “not give up our cartoons.”
A series of attacks or attempted attacks took place after the killings in Nice.
A man was arrested in Sartrouville, France, later on Thursday after he reportedly told his father he wanted to copy the Nice attack, Le Parisien reported.
A man with a knife was killed by the police in Avignon after reportedly threatening the police and shouting “Allahu akbar.”
In Saudi Arabia, a man was arrested after attacking a security guard at the French Consulate in Jeddah “with a sharp object”, the Saudi government said.
Macron mentioned the other attacks in his speech in Nice, but did not say explicitly whether they were connected.
France raised its attack alert level to “urgent” on Thursday, the country’s highest.
A timeline
- October 16: Samuel Paty, a teacher, was decapitated in Paris after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by Charlie Hebdo magazine.
- October 21: President Macron said France would embrace free speech and not “renounce the caricatures.”
- October 26: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Macron of having an “anti-Islam” agenda and called on people in Turkey to boycott French goods.
- October 27: Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon depicting Erdogan lifting the dress of a veiled woman.
- October 29: Three people were killed in a stabbing in Nice; a man who said he wanted to do a similar attack was arrested in Sartrouville; a man with a knife was killed by police in Avignon; and a man tried to attack a security guard in the French Consulate in Saudi Arabia.
Well, looks like the Frogs still have not learned to deal with the Murdering Muslims. As anyone can see, the followers of Islam have no honor or integrity and that comes from the teachings of their leader, Mohammad! They murder innocent women and children without regard! They are the scum of the earth and have no place in a civilized society! Until the French start treating these low-life, no good Muslims like the lying murderers they are, the French will continue to have the experiences they are having now with the them!!!
How right you are they come from what I call shit holes where is no law an order to a peaceful place but for some reason they want to turn your country into the same shit hole from whence they came. They should not be allowed in here in the first place end of
Satan is running rampant in the world and if President Trump doesn’t get reelected that’s what’s going to happen in the United States bear my words truth these people are insane
AMEN!! Its disgusting how they think they can come to our countries and do what they want, there needs to be a crack down period, they need to be deported and stay in there own country, imagine if Christians did this it would not be tolerated they serve Satan period!, there is only ONE TRUE GOD HIS NAME IS JESUS CHRIST 👑👑👑
And to top it all? All of Islam is now blaming Macron (no hero of mine!) for the ills of Islam in France and the world.
These people are simply insane. And so would you be if, from your birth to death you were forced, on the threat of death, to read comic books chiselled together by a primitive peasant.
We MUST stay strong and rid ourselves of this insanity.
The world does not need ANYTHING, apart from oil, from these dreadful sub-humans……..SO?
Refuse to take any more of their demented terrorists into the West and take, one way or another, the oil.
Incidentally, remember that at one time in our history we couldn’t have lit our lamps without whale-oil..
As the man said……”This too shall,pass away……..”.
Once we have a practical alternative source of power….Islam , and the hundred branches and sects within it, will destroy itself and will disappear into the mists of history…………sanity will return to the land….an hundreds of lives will be saved from the madnessnof primitive terrorist Muslims. AMEN!
See what happens when you open a country up? Now your stuck.
They say that when these child-killers die, they go to a place where there are 72 virgins waiting for them. Then I say, LET’S GET THESE LOW-LIFES LAID!!
They need to crack down on immigration. They’ve always been the target of terrorist since the 70’s. When are you going to learn? It’s ok to be nice, but there’s also being too damn nice and putting yourself at risk.
Simply put, 9/11 has not taught any of our leaders anything ! What in the hell is going to take for people in control to wake the hell up.