French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday visited the hospital where preschool children who were wounded in a knife attack in the Alpine town of Annecy were being treated. Four children and two adults were injured in the attack by a Syrian refugee. The president said that their conditions were improving.
Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where three of the four injured children were being treated for wounds sustained in Thursday’s knife attack at a public park in Annecy.
The French president also visited those who "contributed in helping and supporting them", including a young Catholic pilgrim who came face to face with the assailant.
Speaking to a group of local officials and victims of the attack who had been discharged from hospital at the Annecy town hall on Friday, Macron hailed the courage and quick response of emergency workers.
He also said he had heard "positive” news on the condition of the wounded children after visiting the Grenoble University Hospital.
"Everything that I was told is heading in the right direction," Macron said. "Their conditions have stabilised."
Investigators were trying to understand the motives behind the frenzied stabbing rampage in a playground in Annecy, a normally idyllic lakeside spot popular with foreign and domestic visitors.
One of the victims was British and another from the Netherlands. Two adults, elderly men both in their 70s, were also wounded. The youngest child wounded was just 22 months old and the oldest 36 months.
While prosecutors insisted they did not see any terror motive in the attack, the rampage intensified tensions in France over immigration, with the far-right pointing to the origins of the refugee but the government urging unity.
'State of shock'
The attacker, dressed in black and carrying a blade around 10 centimetres (four inches) long, could be heard shouting "in the name of Jesus Christ", according to a video taken by a bystander and seen by AFP.
"There's no obvious terrorist motive," local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis told reporters.
She said an investigation for attempted murder had been opened and that the suspect, named as Abdalmasih H, was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The man spent the night in detention and should undergo a psychiatric examination on Friday.
Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne said the suspect was "not known by any intelligence service" and did not have "any history of psychiatric problems".
Recently divorced from a Swedish national and in his early 30s, the suspect had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife told AFP.
"He called me around four months ago. He was living in a church," his ex-wife said on condition of anonymity, saying he had left Sweden because he had been unable to get Swedish nationality.
The attacker's mother, who has lived in the United States for 10 years, said she was "in a state of shock".
Macron on Thursday called the violence an "attack of absolute cowardice".
'Troubling coincidence'
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told broadcaster TF1 that "for reasons not well explained he had also sought asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France".
It emerged that a late November application in France was rejected last Sunday as he already enjoyed refugee status in Sweden.
Darmanin described the turning down of that application and the stabbings as a "troubling coincidence".
Witnesses described the assailant running around the park on the banks of Lake Annecy wearing a bandana and sunglasses, apparently attacking people at random.
Armed police arrested him at the scene.
"He wanted to attack everyone. I moved away and he lunged at an old man and woman and stabbed the old man," former professional footballer Anthony Le Tallec, who was running in the park, told the local Dauphine Libere newspaper.
France has suffered a series of attacks in the last decade or so, most of them by Islamic extremists.
Most recently, the beheading of a teacher in broad daylight in 2020 near his school in a Paris suburb by a radicalised Chechen refugee led to shock and grief, as well as a national debate about the influence of radical Islam in deprived areas.
Immigration debate
Thursday's attack spurred fresh scrutiny of France's immigration and asylum policy, with right-wing politicians seizing on the culprit's identity as a refugee.
"The investigation will determine what happened, but it seems like the culprit has the same profile that you see often in these attacks," the head of the right-wing Republicans party, Éric Ciotti, told reporters at parliament.
French far-right National Rally (RN) figurehead Marine Le Pen meanwhile told French radio that France should "regain sovereignty" on immigration questions and the French constitution should come above EU law in these matters.
But government spokesman Véran said such debates were premature.
"There will be answers that will have to be provided. But I do not understand – when we are in the time of emotion, when the kids are on the operating table – that everyone starts to indulge in a rather unhealthy game of explanations and justifications.
"Now is not the time," he said.
Darmanin, the interior minister, is drafting a new immigration law for France which he hopes will include tougher measures to deport foreign nationals while offering more legal routes to visas for unskilled workers.
He had been attending a meeting of interior ministers in Luxembourg on Thursday, where EU nations reached agreement on a long-stalled revision of the bloc's rules to share the hosting of asylum seekers and migrants more equitably.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP)
