French police arrest two more suspects over Nice attack

French soldiers patrol near the Saint Gery church in Cambrai

Credit: Reuters

Two more people are being held for questioning over a knife attack by a suspected Islamist in a Nice church last week,  French police said on Sunday.

Six suspected accomplices are now in custody in connection with the murderous rampage that left three dead. The assailant, Brahim Assouaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian, is in critical condition in hospital after being shot eight times by police.

Police are prioritising the hypothesis that the attack was planned in advance and that Assouaoui may have received orders to travel to France to carry it out, according to the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. Investigators suspect that local accomplices pointed out the church to him.

A previously unknown group calling itself ‘Al Mahdi in the Tunisian South’ has claimed the attack. ‘Mahdi’ means the ‘rightly guided one’ in Arabic. It is used to refer to a Messianic figure who Muslims believe will appear at the end of time.

Assouaoui arrived in Italy in September and carried out the attack in Nice’s Notre-Dame Basilica just 48 hours after crossing the border into France.

CCTV footage shows him apparently reconnoitring the church hours before striking.

The latest suspects detained are two men, aged 63 and 45. They had visited the home of another man detained earlier in the southern French town of Grasse. All six people being held are men believed to have had contact with the attacker.

A man has also been arrested in Lyon over the shooting of a Greek Orthodox priest at his church in the city on Saturday. The priest is in critical condition in hospital after being shot twice with a sawn-off shotgun.

It is being investigated as a criminal case rather than terrorism. When there are reasonable grounds to conclude that the motive for an attack in France was terrorism, specialised terrorism prosecutors usually take over investigations within hours, as happened in Nice.

Police are exploring the possibility that the Lyon shooting stemmed from a conflict within the city’s small Greek Orthodox community or a personal dispute, although they said they were pursuing “all lines of inquiry”.

Despite France’s coronavirus lockdown, worshippers were allowed to attend mass at French churches on Sunday, All Saints’ Day, under military and police guard. 

France has been placed on maximum security alert since the beheading last month of a teacher who showed his class cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. About 7,000 soldiers are patrolling streets and guarding places of worship and other potential targets, along with thousands of police officers.

Worshippers wore face-masks and maintained social distancing during services at the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris on Sunday morning.

Fewer people than usual for All Saints’ Day attended services, but Michèle, 56, said she was reassured by the presence of soldiers. “It’s awful that we have to face the threat of both terrorism and the virus, but I felt that I had to come to mass today,” she said.