The terrorist that killed 2 women and a man at a church in the French city of Nice has been identified as a 21-year-old Tunisian who entered the country as an asylum seeker just weeks earlier. He had originally travelled from Tunisia into Italy and then into France.
It is thought that all three individuals were stabbed to death but that one victim, a 60-year-old woman, was near beheaded. One of the victims was of Brazilian origin and had lived in France for around 30 years.
The attacks were believed to be motivated by Islamic extremist ideology and come just a week after a French history teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded outside his school by a Chechen refugee who was angered by the fact that Mr. Paty had shown a picture of the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a class as part of a discussion on freedom of speech. Mr. Paty had allowed Muslim students to leave the class before it was shown.
There have been protests across the Islamic world after French President Emmanuel Macron made statements saying that Muslims in France were not properly integrating into French society nor adopting the secular values upon which the French state was built. In response to the Nice attack, the French Interior Minister said in a statement:
"We need to understand that there have been and there will be other events such as these terrible attacks. We're at war against an ideology, Islamist ideology."
France has been subject to a huge number of attacks in the last decade from Islamic extremists that have killed almost 300 people, including the Bataclan nightclub attack in Paris and the Marseille truck attack. There have also been dozens of small scale attacks mostly using knives and vehicles throughout France.
Nice resident Frederic Lefèvre, 50, told BBC news:
"This is a tragedy once again. We're a free country, we have demonstrated freedom to all countries of the world. Today, this freedom is closing in on us. Life needs to be lived for everyone."
Some sociologists have claimed that Islamic extremism has been encouraged in France as a result of ghettoisation and lack of opportunity felt by Muslim youth who are ostracised from wider society. However, this attack was carried out by someone who it appears went to France perhaps solely to carry out an attack against French Christians.
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