France Terror Attack: A police vehicle is parked near the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption basilica in Nice.
Paris, France:
French police have made two new arrests as part of the investigation into an attack on a church in the southern city of Nice that left three people dead, as authorities seek to understand the profile of the alleged killer, said on Sunday judicial sources.
Authorities now have a total of six people for questioning to understand if they were related to Tunisian Brahim Issaoui, who, according to prosecutors, carried out the knife rampage early Thursday morning in Notre Dame Basilica.
It is not known so far if he had outside help for the attack, which French President Emmanuel Macron has called an act of “Islamist” terror and was the latest in a series of recent attacks. weeks in France.
The last people detained are aged 25 and 63 and were arrested Saturday at the home of an individual detained earlier in the day, a judicial source told AFP, asking not to be named.
Three other detainees earlier for alleged links with Issaoui are still in detention.
Issaoui has been shot and killed by the police on several occasions and is currently in serious condition in hospital. Investigators were unable to question him and his precise motivations remain unclear.
“It is still too early to say if there were other accomplices, what were his motivations to come to France and when this idea took root in him,” another source close to the investigation said on Saturday. who asked not to be named.
The source said information from two phones belonging to him as well as an investigation by Tunisian authorities would be decisive in the investigation.
Investigators believe that Issaoui traveled illegally to Europe via the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa on September 20.
He arrived at the Italian port of Bari on October 9 before heading to Nice just two days before the attack.
France is angry after the reissue of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in early September by the weekly Charlie Hebdo, which was followed by an attack in front of its former offices, the beheading of a teacher and now the bombing in Nice .
On Saturday, an assailant armed with a cut-off shotgun seriously injured a Greek Orthodox priest in a shooting outside a church in the French city of Lyon.
Nikolaos Kakavelaki, 52, was closing his church in Lyon mid-afternoon when attacked and is now in serious condition in hospital, said a police source who asked not to be named .
The attacker fled the scene but the Lyon public prosecutor’s office subsequently announced that a suspect had been arrested while adding that the motivation for the attack was not clear.
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