‘Everyone is asking why’: Annecy locals try to make sense of knife attack on children

People gather on 9 June to lay flowers for the victims of a stabbing attack the day before in the Jardins de l'Europe parc in Annecy, French Alps. Photograph: Olivier Chassignole/AFP/Getty Images

By the wooden climbing frame in the shape of a pirate ship, Jean-Xavier dismounted from his bike and surveyed the piles of flowers and candles lit for the four children aged between 22 months and three who were seriously injured when a knife attacker stabbed toddlers in this lakeside playground in the French Alps town of Annecy.

“Everyone is asking why,” he said, as his own two-year-old son, who usually liked whizzing down the slides here, sat sucking a dummy and clutching a toy rabbit, strapped safely into his bike seat. “Stabbings happen a lot in France but to actually go after small children in a playground gives a different context – it’s incomprehensible.”