Paris – A Syrian refugee armed with a knife spread terror yesterday in a park in Annecy, in the French Alps, wounding six people, including four children between the ages of 22 and 36 months, before being arrested.
This “absolutely cowardly attack” and which left “several children and an adult between life and death”, in the words of French President Emmanuel Macron, shocked France and generated demonstrations of solidarity in Europe.
The attacker, Abdalmasih H., was a Syrian refugee who had obtained protection in Sweden in 2013, where he lived for 10 years, and who at the end of 2022 moved to France, where he applied for asylum in November, according to various sources.
The justice opened an investigation for assassination attempts, ruling out for now the “terrorist motive,” said the Annecy prosecutor, Line Bonnet-Mathis, specifying that the attacker did not act under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The French Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, who traveled to this tourist city of about 140,000 inhabitants in the Alps, also assured that the man had no known judicial or psychiatric history.
In France, he was in a legal situation. Her ex-partner in Sweden, with whom he had a three-year-old daughter, assured that she left because she did not obtain Swedish nationality and that she told him four months ago that she lived “in a church” in France.
The attacker’s mother, who has lived in the United States for ten years, said she was in “a state of shock.”
The attacker said “in the name of Jesus Christ” in English when he attacked, according to a video consulted by international media. When he was arrested, he was carrying a cross and, in his asylum application file, he declared himself a “Christian from Syria,” a police source reported.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, told the TF1 channel that “for reasons not yet fully clarified, he also sought asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France.”
He went on to describe the denial of that request and the stabbings as a “troubling coincidence.”
The attack took place in the gardens of Europe, a popular park on the shores of Lake Annecy.
The attacker, dressed in black with a knotted headscarf, walked towards the strollers and attacked children in a play area, according to footage from the drama. Several witnesses indicated that he then tried to flee, wounding a man in his path, before being quickly stopped by police, who fired.
“I wanted to attack everyone. I moved away and he pounced on a grandfather and a grandmother, and stabbed their grandfather,” Anthony Le Tallec, a former Saint Etienne and Liverpool footballer, told the regional newspaper Le Dauphiné libéré.
Six people were injured, including the four children who are in critical condition as well as one adult, according to the Annecy prosecutor. One minor is of Dutch nationality and another is British.
According to Le Dauphiné libéré, most of the victims were taken to the Annecy Genevois hospital and the witnesses initially to a building near the scene of the drama.
“My 17-year-old son witnessed it. A person brandished a knife and stabbed a baby in his stroller. Then he saw a crowd, screams, blood, ”said a mother who went to look for her son at the prefecture.
In the afternoon, the authorities allowed access to the park again. Several children were playing in the same area where the attack took place, which disrupted life in this quiet town.
“Its inhuman. I heard screams from the parents and saw the attacker with the knife. I told myself that if he ran, he was going to die, so I walked away, ”said Clémence, a 17-year-old student.
From the left to the extreme right, political leaders condemned the attack and expressed their solidarity with the victims and their families. The National Assembly observed a minute of silence.
In a context of political tension over a future immigration reform, the right-wing and extreme-right parties called for a tightening of this policy to curb “mass immigration.”
Political leaders from Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom expressed their solidarity with France and the victims.
France has been the target of a series of traumatic jihadist attacks in the last decade, such as those perpetrated against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall in 2015, and the city of Nice (southeast) in 2016.
More recently, the 2020 beheading of a teacher in broad daylight near his school on the outskirts of Paris by a Chechen refugee sparked an outpouring of grief and a national debate about the influence of radical Islam.
Source: Ambito
