Nice terrorist identified as 21-year-old Tunisian immigrant, Brahim Aouissaoui

Shocking details emerge of the Nice church attack by Tunisian migrant Brahim Aouissaoui.

The knifeman, Brahim Aouissaoui, after he was shot by police. Picture: BackGrid

The young Tunisian immigrant, later identified as Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, arrived at Nice’s main railway station at 7am, police CCTV footage showed. Carrying a copy of the Koran, three knives and two telephones in his bag, he entered the basilica, a 19th century Gothic edifice on the Avenue Jean Medecin, when the sexton opened it at about 8.30am. No service had begun but people entered to pray, three days before All Saints’ Day.

As he slashed at his victims, someone ran from the church to a bakery next door and raised the alarm. Officers from the armed municipal police were on the scene in a minute. The man came out of the church, according to Didier-Olivier Reverdy of the police officer’s union Alliance Police Nationale.

“There was a kind of panic around the concourse” of the church, he said. “There was blood visible.” Officers opened fire and the man moved back towards the church then he was hit by at least two rounds and fell, witnesses said.

BREAKING - Mayor of Nice: "The terrorist shouted Allah-u-Akbar at the time of the attack," then beheaded a person inside the church of Notre-Damme in Nice. 2 more dead.pic.twitter.com/2VGf29Ateo

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) October 29, 2020

Daniel Conilh, 32, a waiter at the Grand Cafe de Lyon a Nice near the church, said it was shortly before 9am when “shots were fired and everybody took off running.”

He added: “A woman came in straight from the church and said, ‘Run, run, someone has been stabbing people’.”

BREAKING - Knife stabbing attack at Notre-Dame church in Nice. One dead and several injured. pic.twitter.com/EOoQGL2yHG

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) October 29, 2020

Dozens of police and rescue vehicles sealed off the neighbourhood and a unit from the Raid police tactical force turned up. For a time after the attack, explosions could be heard as sappers detonated suspicious objects.

Jean-François Ricard, France's anti-terrorism prosecutor, has given an update on the timeline of the Nice attack.

More on this story here: https://t.co/sJ0mCD8hlD pic.twitter.com/HjuwzSXJKi

— SkyNews (@SkyNews) October 29, 2020

The mayor said the victims had been killed in a “horrible way”. With its attempted beheading, the attack had clearly mimicked the killing of Samuel Paty, Mr Estrosi said. “The methods match, without doubt, those used against the brave teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine,” he said.

Mr Estrosi, who is a senior right-wing figure in the conservative Republicans party, added: “Enough is enough. It is time for France to exonerate itself from the laws of peace in order to definitively wipe out Islamo-fascism from our territory.”

Among the torrent of online attacks on France this week over its supposed hostility to Islam, al-Qaeda issued a call to supporters to wreak revenge for the Prophet against French churches. Gil Florini, a priest in the Nice diocese, said: “We had received warnings to be alert to possible incidents but we didn’t imagine anything like this.”

The sexton, a lay caretaker at the basilica, was much admired in the parish, Mr Florini told BFMTV news. “He did his job as a sexton very well. He was a very kind person.”

The knifeman was not listed by Tunisian police as a suspected militant before he left the country, a judiciary official in Tunis said. Originally from the village of Sidi Omar Bouhajla near Kairouan, Aouissaoui had been living in Sfax and police were questioning his family there last night (Thursday).

Sfax, a port about 130km (80 miles) from the Italian island of Lampedusa, is an important point of departure for Tunisians looking to make the crossing to Europe. A French police source said Aouissaoui was not known to French intelligence services either.

France has witnessed a wave of terrorist incidents in recent days. In Lyons hours after the Nice attack, police arrested a man on an intelligence watch list who was allegedly carrying a knife. In Jeddah a Saudi man was held after attacking a guard at the French consulate.

In the Paris suburbs this month Samuel Paty, a school teacher, was decapitated by an 18-year-old Chechen-born migrant for displaying caricatures of the Prophet in a class about free speech. In September a 25-year-old terrorist knifed two people outside the former premises of Charlie Hebdo in Paris after the trial opened of alleged accomplices in the 2015 murders. Both terrorists were shot dead by police.

President Macron, at the site of the attack in Nice, voiced support for the French Catholic Church, which has been the target of terrorist attacks and plots in recent years, including the beheading of a priest in Normandy in July 2016. France “will not give up its values and . . . we must give no grounds to division,” he said. The president said he would double to 7,000 the number of security forces personnel who were deployed to protect French churches.

Jean Castex, the prime minister, told the Senate: “With the attack against Samuel Paty, freedom of speech was targeted. With this attack in Nice, it is freedom of religion.”

World leaders condemned the attack and voiced support for France.

Our hearts are with the people of France. America stands with our oldest Ally in this fight. These Radical Islamic terrorist attacks must stop immediately. No country, France or otherwise can long put up with it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2020

Condemnation also came from Turkey despite a torrent of insults from President Erdogan this week against Mr Macron for his supposed promotion of caricatures of Muhammad and a crackdown on fundamentalist Muslim mosques and networks after the Samuel Paty killing.

The French Council of the Muslim Faith, which this week distanced itself from Mr Macron’s insistence on the right to religious mockery condemned the Nice attack and called on French Muslims to refrain from festivities this week marking the birth of Muhammad “as a sign of mourning and in solidarity with the victims and their loved ones”.

The Nice attack triggered an outcry from far-right and conservative politicians who said that despite an offensive against political Islam that Mr Macron launched a month ago, the president had still not realised the enormity of the threat the country faced.

“The government has still not understood the threat,” Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally and runner-up to Mr Macron in the presidential election in 2017, said.

With his new campaign against Islamist “separatism”, launched before the teacher’s killing, Mr Macron switched to a harder line towards the radical French-born and immigrant Muslims he says have rejected France and seek to destroy the nation from within.

The latest terrorist outrages have led him to toughen his language against “political Islam”. No terrorists would deter France from its tradition of allowing religion to be mocked in the name of freedom of expression and caricatures of religious figures to be shown by teachers in schools, he said.

Aides to Mr Macron said his stance in defence of French values was sometimes misunderstood by neighbouring states and was being wilfully misinterpreted by Mr Erdogan and other Muslim leaders for their own political end.

France’s national police chief had already ordered increased security at churches and mosques this week, but no police appeared to be guarding the Nice church when it was attacked, and there were no visible security forces at multiple prominent religious sites in Paris yesterday (Thursday).

The Nice attacker was believed to be acting alone, and police are not searching for other assailants, two police officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

The Times