An attacker with a knife has injured four children between two and three years old and an adult on Thursday in a playground in a town in the French Alps, as confirmed by Gerald Darmanin, the French Interior Minister. The attack occurred around 09:45 a.m. (local time) in a busy park in Annecy, a mountain-tourism town at the foot of the Alps.
Police detained the attacker four minutes after carrying out the attack, authorities said. This is Abdalmasih H., born in 1991, a Syrian national, who obtained asylum in Sweden. The man was shot in the leg by police during his arrest, making him the second adult injured. The individual was not recorded by the police files, reported a police source, who specified that he had been living in the Scandinavian country for ten years.
The attacker is married to a Swedish woman and has a 3-year-old son, according to French television BFMTV. According to a source familiar with the matter, he was carrying a cross and a Christian prayer book at the time of his arrest and in his asylum application, he declared himself a “Christian from Syria.” An evaluation of the attack is still underway to determine if it has a terrorist character or not.
Two of the injured children and one adult are in serious condition. An ambulance helicopter was necessary for their immediate evacuation. “Children and an adult are between life and death. The nation is shocked,” French President Emmanuel Macron lamented in a statement posted on the social network Twitter, calling the attack “an act of absolute cowardice.” Elisabeth Borne, the Prime Minister of France, and Minister Darmanin, traveled to Annecy.
According to information from BFMTV, among the injured children are a brother and sister aged 2 and 3, a 22-month-old German boy and a 2-year-old English boy. The adult in critical condition is a 78-year-old man.
A nearby man who approached when he heard the screams described the attacker as a 45-year-old man who said nothing as he carried out the attack. According to various testimonies, the man attacked an elderly man when he tried to flee after being cornered. “He wanted to attack everyone. I stepped to the side and he ran right into a grandpa and a grandma and stabbed the grandpa,” said former Saint-Etienne and Liverpool player Anthony Le, who was jogging by the lake where the attack occurred. attack, to the newspaper Dauphiné Libéré Tallec. “It was total panic,” he added.
“It was a bit unreal (…) he was screaming, it was not necessarily understandable what he was saying. She was attacking babies (…) she fled, the police arrived. They tried to stop him at first without opening fire, when he understood that he was trapped, he attacked an old man and there they shot him in the legs, â€said Malo, a witness contacted by BFMTV who was near the game area.
This tragedy caused great commotion in the National Assembly where a minute’s silence was observed at the request of President Yaël Braun-Pivet “for them, for their families”, after this “serious attack”.
The president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, where the events occurred, Laurent Wauquiez, denounced the attack. “This attack on children is the height of abomination,” he added, thanking the police “for the courage they showed in arresting the attacker.”
