A man armed with a knife stabbed four children and two adults in a park in south-eastern France on Thursday, authorities said. President Emmanuel Macron called the attack “absolutely cowardly”.
The local authorities announced a statement that in the attack, which took place in Annecy, a town of about 130,000 people, a suspect was arrested and all the wounded were hospitalized.
Her immediate condition was not clear, but Mr Macron was said on Twitter that “children and an adult are caught between life and death” as a result of the attack. He added: “The nation is in shock.”
The attack happened just before 10am at a popular lakeside park in Annecy. Anthony Le Tallec, a former professional soccer player who ended his career at City, said he watched the attack. In an Instagram story From the park, where he filmed police officers and emergency workers on the scene, he said he was jogging along the lake shore when he saw dozens of people running the other way.
“There was a mother who said to me, ‘Run! Someone stabs everyone. “He stabbed children,” Mr Le Tallec said.
He then got out of the way as the assailant, who was being pursued by police, ran towards him, he said. The attacker charged an elderly man nearby and stabbed him, Mr Le Tallec added.
“It’s crazy to see that in Annecy,” he said.
A woman who said she witnessed the attack told a local radio station that the attacker jumped a park fence and stabbed a little girl and a baby in a stroller. “I really thought it was a joke but not at all,” said the woman, who could not be identified. said Radio France Bleu. “When I heard the mother’s cry, I started to run.”
Antoine Armand, a legislator for the Haute-Savoie region, which includes Annecy, described the stabbing as “an attack on our souls”.
France’s lower house of parliament observed a minute’s silence after news of the attack broke, briefly halting heated debates among lawmakers Mr Macron’s pension reform. Yaël Braun-Pivet, Speaker of the House of Commons, said French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne had traveled to Annecy to hear about the stabbings.
Terrorist attacks have not made the headlines in France in recent years, but the country is still on high alert and authorities say police and intelligence services regularly thwart attacks.
Although the motive for Thursday’s stabbings was not immediately clear, large-scale Islamist terrorist attacks have swept across France in 2015 And in 2016followed by a series of smaller but still fatal shootings and stabbings in the years that followed, often carried out by individuals.
In April: Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on news channel BFMTV that security forces have foiled 41 potential terrorist attacks since 2017, including about a dozen since 2020, and that most of these were planned by people with radical Islamist views.
Attacks specifically targeting children are rare in France.
In 1993, a masked gunman held young children hostage for two days at their kindergarten in a Paris suburb, but he eventually released her unharmed before he was killed by police officers. And in 2012 a radical Islamist gunman went to a Rampage in and around the southwestern city of ToulouseA rabbi and three children were killed in a Jewish school. A few days later, the police fatally shot the attacker.
