Macron vows defiance after ‘Islamist’ knife attack in church kills three

NICE AFP Oct30, 2020 - French president Emmanuel Macron vowed his country would stand firm against religious extremists after a knife-wielding man killed three people at a church, in the country’s second attack blamed on Islamist terrorism this month.   

A knife attacker killed three people, cutting the throat of at least one woman, inside a church in Nice on the French Riviera on Thursday.   

The attacker had a copy of the Koran and three knives with him, France’s anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard told a news conference.   

In a near half-hour frenzy, the assailant used a 30 centimetre (12 inch) knife to cut the throat of a 60-year-old woman, who died inside the church.   

The body of a man, a 55-year-old church employee, was found nearby inside the basilica -- his throat had also been slit.  Another woman, a 44-year-old who had fled the church to a nearby restaurant, died shortly afterwards from multiple knife wounds.   

The killer was shot and wounded by police who arrived quickly at the scene.  The brutal killings come only two weeks after a French teacher was decapitated outside his school north of Paris by an Islamist extremist -- the teacher had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of speech.   

After Thursday’s attack, Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad tweeted that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.