“Crowds, screams, blood”: Thursday’s stabbing attack on children and adults near Lake Annecy has sown fear in this usually peaceful town in southeastern France , where witnesses and inhabitants were amazed and devastated.
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“It’s a shock,” said Kévin Poncin, 27, on his bike stopped near the garden of Europe, not far from the Pâquier esplanade bordering the crystal clear waters of the lake, where this took place. attack perpetrated by a Syrian refugee which injured six people, including four children aged between 22 months and three years.
In a very crude video of the attack circulating on social media, the man dressed in black with a scarf over his head can be seen jumping into a playground in the park after being attacked by a man armed with a a bag.
We see him stabbing several children, two of whom are installed in a two-seater pram, then jumping from one to the other. A man shouts: “Call the police!”
The assailant ended up being pushed back by a woman who was shouting “Help! Stop it! Stop him!” by trying to protect the pram, and by the man with the bag who calls passers-by for help: “Help me control it”!.
“My 17 year old attended. A person brandished a knife and stabbed a baby in a pram, that’s what he saw, then he saw the crowd, screams, blood. It was not pretty to see, ”reported to AFP a mother, who did not give her name, who came to pick up her son at the prefecture.
According to various testimonies, after fleeing the area, the man attacked an elderly person before being arrested very quickly by the police who shot him to immobilize him.
“It’s inhumane. I heard the screams of the parents, then I saw the attacker with the knife. That’s when I realized that something serious was happening. I told myself that if I ran I was going to die, so I walked away. In these cases, we only have our survival in mind. Then he left for the lakeside promenade and we heard gunshots,” said Clémence, a 17-year-old high school student.
“I was running by the lake, and suddenly I see dozens of people running in the opposite direction from me. I wonder what’s going on, there’s a mom who tells me “Run! Run! There is someone who stabs everyone all along the lake, he stabbed children!”, Recounted in a brief Instagram the former professional footballer Anthony Le Tallec.
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“I continue and I actually see the guy who arrives in front of me, on the grass. I see cops who are five, ten meters behind him, who can’t catch him. He comes towards me, so I move away. And I see he’s going straight for grandpas and grandmas, and there he attacks the grandpa, he stabs him once, the cops behind him can’t catch him. And I tell them ‘but shoot him, kill him! He’s stabbing everyone!
“He attacks once, twice, and there they start shooting, so there they shoot in front of me, at the person, so he falls to the ground, the grandpa was already hit. I continue my race, and I see children on the ground, very unhappy, affected children”, testified again the player who finished his career in this city, adding: “It’s crazy to see that in Annecy “.
The surroundings of the park were cordoned off by a large police force, noted an AFP journalist.
“It affects everyone. I hope that the politicians will preserve a certain stability between people, that they will not encourage amalgamation and confusion ” towards foreigners or French people of foreign origin, reacted a 48-year-old father under the guise of anonymity.
The terrorist character or not of the attack is being assessed. The suspect, who was wearing a Christian cross when he was arrested, had indicated in his asylum application file filed in France that he was “Christian from Syria”, according to a police source.