JAKARTA - President Emmanuel Macron said he would increase the deployment of thousands of troops to protect important locations, such as places of worship and schools. The state security warning was raised to its highest level following the attacks in the City of Nice, Thursday, October 29.
Speaking outside the church, Macron said France had been attacked "for our values, for our appetite for freedom, for the ability on our land to have freedom of belief ... And I say it very clearly again today: We will not give up. "
The attack came less than two weeks after a high school teacher on the outskirts of Paris was beheaded by an 18-year-old assailant who appeared to be angered by teachers showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
Chief anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said the suspect in the Nice attack was a Tunisian man born in 1999 who had arrived in Europe on September 20 in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia that is the main landing point for migrants from Africa. Tunisian security sources and French police sources named the suspect as Brahim Aouissaoui.
Ricard told a news conference in Nice that the man entered the city by train on Thursday morning and went to the church, where he stabbed and killed a 55-year-old church clerk and beheaded a 60-year-old woman.
He also stabbed a 44-year-old woman who fled to a nearby cafe where she sounded the alarm before she died, Ricard said. The police then arrived and confronted the attacker, shot and injured him.
"(Found) a 30cm crime knife with a 17cm sharp edge. We also found a bag left by the attackers. Next to this bag are two knives that were not used in the attack," said Ricard.
Currently, the suspect is in hospital in critical condition. Tunisian counter-militancy special court spokesman Mohsen Dali told Reuters that Aouissaoui was not registered by police there as a suspected militant.
He said Aouissaoui left the country on September 14 by boat, adding that Tunisia had started its own forensic investigation into the case.
The mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, said the attack resembled the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in citizenship classes about freedom of expression.
Thursday's attack, on the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, came at a time of growing Muslim anger at France's defense of the right to publish cartoons, and protesters lashing out at France at street demonstrations in several Muslim-majority countries.
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