It was a sunny mid-morning at the edge of one of France’s most beautiful lakes, framed by mountains and park lawns in the picturesque French Alps city of Annecy.
The quiet, waterside playground, with a slide and climbing frame, was a favourite for local toddlers with their parents and childminders as well as tourists. High school children were also milling around in the morning shade. Annecy had been in the news recently only for concerns over too much Airbnb accommodation in tourist towns – and for its famous animated film festival, which was due to start on Sunday.
At 9.45am there were sounds of women shouting for help from the park and screaming, grabbing children and running, calling for police. Witnesses said an “indescribable” horror unfolded as toddlers and babies were stabbed and bleeding.
As children played, a man with a knife with a 10-centimetre blade had jumped the fence and gone first towards a woman with a pushchair, who screamed for help as he reached for babies then headed for toddlers.
An ice-cream seller and other local people recognised the man – dressed in black and wearing sunglasses and a bandana – who they said had been sitting near the park in previous months. They said he hadn’t seemed dangerous in previous weeks; he sometimes said hello and was often sitting on a bench with a bag beside him, looking out at the lake. But he was always alone.
Investigators are still trying to determine why on Thursday morning the man in his early 30s, who the French prime minister said was a homeless Syrian with refugee status in Sweden, and who was described by police sources to the French media as a Christian, had gone into the park brandishing a knife.
He had at first deliberately ignored adults in order to specifically stab toddlers. In a video taken by a bystander and viewed by AFP, the man could be heard shouting “in the name of Jesus Christ”. The local prosecutor said there was “no apparent terrorist motive” for the attack at this stage. The man was not drunk, or under the influence of drugs, the prosecutor said.
Annecy was plunged into a state of shock and confusion. One young woman who had been playing boules near the playground told local France Bleu Pays de Savoie radio that at first she had been puzzled when she saw the man jump the fence around the playground and run towards children.
“I didn’t understand, I thought it was a game,” she said. “He jumped the barrier, stabbed a little girl, then a baby in a pushchair. I thought it was a toy. I thought it was a joke, but no, he had a real knife. When I heard a mum screaming, I turned and ran.”
Christina, who worked in the area near the park, said she saw a child bleeding heavily. She thought there had been a bike accident. “But there was a group of young people who seemed in a state of shock and were telling police cars where to go when they arrived,” she said.
An older retired man who had been cycling on a lakeside cycle path told LCI TV: “I saw a little child, I saw blood across their stomach, I thought ‘that isn’t an accident caused by a swing’ … then saw people running, screaming.”
A refuse collector said he and colleagues were on their morning round emptying bins “when we saw people running, carrying their children”. They tried to step in to stop the attacker; he ran out on to the lawns near the lake and at that moment, police officers arrived and gave chase. Meanwhile, a passerby carrying a rucksack had attempted to pursue the attacker across the park lawns, trying to throw or swing his heavy bag at him.
The former Liverpool footballer Anthony Le Tallec (above), who was out on a lakeside run, described how police chased the attacker on foot. But the attacker then lunged at a 70-year-old man, stabbing and wounding him, before police fired shots and arrested him. The 70-year-old man was also hit by ammunition from a police weapon during the arrest and was being treated for his injuries.
Four children were critically injured and treated in hospital. One was 22 months old, two were two years old, and one three years old. One of the children was British and another Dutch.
Dozens more young children who had witnessed other toddlers being stabbed were being given psychological support, as were parents and childminders who had been in the park, and park workers. Children at a nearby school were locked down to be kept safe before their parents came to collect them.
There were fears that the attacker’s status as a refugee in Sweden, free to travel in the EU, could immediately spark spontaneous extreme-right street demonstrations over immigration policy in France. Annecy’s Green party mayor and local politicians called for calm.
France was in shock. The horror and incomprehension brought back grim memories of another attack on children in 2012 when the radicalised, unemployed panel-beater Mohamed Merah killed seven people, including three children and a rabbi, at a Jewish school in the southern city of Toulouse.
There was incomprehension in this quiet corner of the Alps that very young children could be targeted in this way. Antoine Armand, a member of parliament for Haute-Savoie, described it as “an attack against our soul”.
