PARIS: One person died and two police officers were seriously injured in a knife attack in eastern France on Saturday that occurred during a demonstration, the local prosecutor said.
Three more officers were lightly wounded in the attack in the city of Mulhouse, carried out by a 37-year-old suspect who is on a terror prevention watchlist, prosecutor Nicolas Heitz told AFP.
The list, called FSPRT, compiles data from various authorities on individuals with the aim of preventing “terrorist” radicalisation. It was launched in 2015 following deadly attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices and on a Jewish supermarket.
One of the seriously wounded police officers sustained an injury to the carotid artery, and the other to the thorax, Heitz said.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau was expected to travel to the scene of the attack later Saturday.
Police established a security parameter after the attack that happened shortly before 4:00 pm (1500 GMT) during a demonstration in support of Congo.
According to union sources the suspect, born in Algeria, has been under judicial supervision and house arrest, and under an expulsion order from France.
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“Horror has seized our city,” Mulhouse mayor Michele Lutz said on Facebook. The incident was being investigated as a terror attack, she said, but “this must obviously still be confirmed by the judiciary”.
France’s national anti-terror prosecutors unit (PNAT) said it was taking charge of the investigation.
Macron says knife attack was “Islamist terrorism”
French President Emmanuel Macron said the knife attack that killed one and injured three in eastern France on Saturday was “Islamist terrorism”, after France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office confirmed it was investigating the case.
“It is without any doubt an act of Islamist terrorism,” Macron told reporters on the sidelines of the annual French farm show, adding that the interior minister was on his way to Mulhouse.
France has suffered a series of militant attacks over the past decade, but also occasional assaults by mentally ill people.
In February last year, a knife attack in the Gare de Lyon rail station in Paris had left three people wounded.
Police had arrested the suspected attacker, who showed signs of mental disorders, Paris police chief Laurent Nunes told reporters. “We found medicine on him which suggests he was undergoing treatment.”
Two of the victims suffered light wounds while the third was more seriously hurt but was not in a life-threatening situation, police said.
The attacker, who carried Italian residence permits and was in France legally, attacked travellers with a knife and hammer. French media said he was originally from Mali, but Nunes did not confirm the reports.