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Indonesia condemns deadly attack at church in Nice

News Desk (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, October 31, 2020

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Indonesia condemns deadly attack at church in Nice

T

he government has condemned a knife attack that left three people dead and several others injured inside the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice, France, on Thursday while ensuring the safety of Indonesian citizens living there.

 

“Our deepest condolences and sympathies go out to the victims and their families,” the Foreign Ministry tweeted on Thursday.

 

According to the ministry, the Indonesian Embassy in Paris and Consulate General in Marseilles are in active coordination with relevant authorities on the ground to verify the safety of Indonesian citizens.

 

Of 4,023 Indonesians living in France, 25 live in Nice and its surroundings. No Indonesian casualties were reported in the attack, the ministry said.

 

The killings came only two weeks after a French teacher was decapitated outside his school north of Paris.

 

Three people were killed, with a 60-year-old woman and a 45-year-old church sacristan having their throats slit, AFP reported.

The other victim, a 44-year-old woman, died from multiple knife wounds after fleeing to a nearby restaurant.

 

A suspected knifeman, later identified as Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian, was arrested after being shot and wounded by police.

 

Aouissaoui had gone to the Notre-Dame church soon after arriving in Nice on Thursday morning looking for a place to sleep, his sister Afef said. He had shown them the area and said he planned to rest in a building opposite the church.

 

When they saw the television report showing the aftermath of the attack in which three people were killed, they immediately recognized the place he had been.

 

However, several members of Aouissaoui's family, speaking to Reuters in a suburb of the Tunisian city of Sfax, said they were in shock at his detention by police and the idea that he had committed such a violent crime.

 

"My brother is a friendly person and never showed extremism," Aouissaoui's older brother Yassin said. "He respected all other people and accepted their differences even since he was a child."

 

The French government has raised the security alert status after the incident, which President Emmanuel Macron described as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. 

 

"We are in a war against an enemy that is both inside and outside," France's interior minister Gerald Damarnin told RTL radio. "We need to understand that there have been and there will be other events such as these terrible attacks."

 

Macron has deployed thousands of soldiers to protect important sites, such as places of worship and schools, and France's security alert is at its highest level.

 

Two French newspapers, Le Figaro and Liberation, reported Friday that Darmanin had already told regional authorities last Sunday to be on heightened alert for "individual jihad" attempts.

 

The warning came after a media service called Thabat, which the interior ministry note said was "linked to Al-Qaeda," called for retaliation against France, including the publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons by the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

 

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian insisted Thursday that France extended "a message of peace to the Muslim world" Thursday, saying it was a "country of tolerance”.

 

Many French imams have also appealed for calm.

 

"Today I feel like a Christian, because this touches the very heart of a man or woman," Otmane Aissaoui, imam at the ar-Rahma mosque in Nice, told AFP after the attack Thursday.

 

"Islam, like Christianity or Judaism, is light-years away from an act like this," he said.

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