Paris
A woman was beheaded by an attacker with a knife who also killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday. The city’s mayor categorized the attack as terrorism.
Mayor Christian Estrosi later said that the attacker had yelled “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) repeatedly, even after he was detained by police. Estrosi said on Twitter that the knife attack had happened in or near the city’s Notre Dame church and that police had detained the attacker.
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.
One of the people killed inside the church was believed to be the church warden, Estrosi said, adding that a woman had tried to escape from inside the church and had fled 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,” 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.” The mayor 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 a French teacher beheaded earlier this month in an attack in a suburb of Paris. A police source said a woman was decapitated. French politician Marine Le Pen also spoke of a decapitation having occurred in the attack.—Agencies
