LAST UPDATE | 8 Jun 2023
A MAN WHO stabbed four preschool children and injured two adults in a French Alpine town this morning did not appear to have a “terrorist motive”, the local prosecutor told reporters.
Line Bonnet-Mathis said that of the four children injured in the assault, one was aged just 22 months, two were two-year-olds, and the eldest was three.
The attack occurred in Annecy, a quiet Alpine town of 135,000 people that lies 30 kilometres south of the Swiss city of Geneva.
Investigators are trying to understand the reasons for the frenzied morning rampage in a sunny public park.
The suspect, dressed in black and carrying a blade around 10 centimetres long, could be heard shouting “in the name of Jesus Christ” on a video taken by a bystander and seen by AFP.
Armed police arrested him at the scene after the attack at around 9.45am (8.45am Irish time). He told police he was a Syrian asylum seeker, a police source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“There’s no obvious terrorist motive,” Mathis told reporters at a press conference alongside Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who rushed to the lakeside town around 30 kilometres south of the Swiss city of Geneva.
Borne said the suspect was “not known by any intelligence service” and did not have “any history of psychiatric problems”.
Recently divorced and in his early 30s, he had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife told AFP.
Witnesses described him running around the park on the banks of Lake Annecy wearing a bandana and sunglasses, apparently attacking people at random.
“He wanted to attack everyone. I moved away and he lunged at an old man and woman and stabbed the old man,” former professional footballer Anthony Le Tallec, who was running in the park, told the local Dauphine Libere newspaper.
All four child victims, which include British and German boys, are in a critical state at a local hospital.
UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) press conference: “Our thoughts are with the victims and the families and we stand ready to support the French authorities in whichever way we can.
“Also aware that one of the people, one of the children injured, was a British national. We have already deployed British consular officials who are travelling to the area to make themselves available to support the family.
“And of course we stand in strong solidarity with the people of France at this terrible time.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said “Germany is shocked by this odious and despicable attack in Annecy which also affected a German child.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has called the attack one of “absolute cowardice”.
“Children and an adult are between life and death. The Nation is in shock. Our thoughts are with them as well as their families and the emergency services mobilised,” he added.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin tweeted that the culprit “has been arrested thanks to the rapid reaction of security forces”.
Attaque d’une lâcheté absolue ce matin dans un parc à Annecy. Des enfants et un adulte sont entre la vie et la mort. La Nation est sous le choc. Nos pensées les accompagnent ainsi que leurs familles et les secours mobilisés.
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 8, 2023
The attack spurred fresh scrutiny of France’s immigration and asylum policy, with right-wing politicians seizing on the culprit’s identity as a refugee.
“The investigation will determine what happened, but it seems like the culprit has the same profile that you see often in these attacks,” the head of the right-wing Republicans party, Eric Ciotti, told reporters at parliament.
“We need to draw conclusions without being naive, with strength and with a clear mind,” he said.
Amid a spate of violent incidents around the country and growing fear about crime, Macron recently said France was undergoing a process of “de-civilisation” – a title of a book by a notorious far-right ideologue, Renaud Camus.
The comments echoed those in 2020 by hardline Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who said France was “turning savage”.
He had been attending a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg today where the bloc was trying to reach an agreement on a long-stalled revision of rules to more equally share the hosting of asylum seekers and migrants.
Darmanin is also drafting a new immigration law for France which he hopes will include tougher measures to deport foreign nationals while offering more legal routes to visas for unskilled workers.
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