ANNECY, FRANCE (AFP) – President Emmanuel Macron yesterday visited the hospital where four preschoolchildren badly wounded in a knife attack by a Syrian refugee that shocked France, with two of the toddlers still in critical condition, and receiving treatment.
The children were stabbed in a playground in the southeastern Alpine town of 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.
Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble where the children are being treated and also visited those who “contributed in helping and supporting them”, the presidency said.
“From what I understand, there are still two children considered to be in critical condition,” government spokesman Olivier Veran told Franceinfo radio, confirming that surgical operations had taken place
The attacker, dressed in black and carrying a blade around 10 centimetres long, could be heard shouting, 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 is to undergo a psychiatric examination.
Prime Minister Elisabeth 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,” 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”.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told broadcaster TF1 “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.