TUNISIAN MAN BEHEADS WOMAN IN NICE; 2 OTHERS STABBED DEAD

A knife-wielding Tunisian man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people in a church in the French city of Nice before being shot and taken away by police, Tangi Salaun and Eric Gillard reported for Reuters. 

President Emmanuel Macron said France will deploy thousands more soldiers to protect important sites such as places of worship and schools, as the country’s security alert was raised to its highest level. 

Speaking outside the church, Macron said France had been attacked “over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief ... And I say it with great clarity again today: We will not give any ground.” 

The attack came just under two weeks after a middle-school teacher in a Paris suburb was beheaded by an 18-year-old attacker who was apparently incensed by the teacher showing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad in class.  Chief anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said the suspect in Thursday’s attack was a Tunisian man born in 1999 who had arrived in Europe on Sept. 20 in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia that is the main landing point for migrants from Africa. A Tunisian security source and a French police source named the suspect as Brahim Aouissaoui. He is in critical condition.