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France

Man attacks soldiers outside Jewish centre in Nice

Three French soldiers were attacked by a man with a knife on Tuesday as they guarded a Jewish community centre in the southern city of Nice. Two of the soldiers were slightly injured – one in the cheek, the other in the arm.

Soldiers outside the Nice Jewish centre where Moussa Coulibaly attacked the soldiers
Soldiers outside the Nice Jewish centre where Moussa Coulibaly attacked the soldiers Reuters//Eric Gaillard
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The third soldier detained the assailant and a possible accomplice, shortly after the attack.

The suspect was carrying an identity card with the name Moussa Coulibaly but had no apparent link to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four shoppers in a kosher supermarket during the Paris attacks last month that left 17 people dead.

The situation for Jewish people in France today is very worrying, Shimon Samuels, the director for International Relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, told RFI.

“We’re facing a new phenomenon, open access terrorism,” declared Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who went to Nice to meet the soldiers.

Intelligence services had been monitoring Coulibaly, a petty criminial who lived in the Paris region and had shown signs of “radicalisation”, police sources said.

At the beginning of last year he aroused the suspicions of a travel agent in Corsica because he tried to by a one-way ticket to Turkey, the route many jihadis take to fight in Syria, although he agreed to buy a return when told it would be cheaper.

The travel agent notified the intelligence services, who contacted the Turkish authorities leading to his being sent back to France on arrival at Istanbul.

After being questioned, he went to Nice, not Corsica as he had claimed he would, where he was followed, according to Le Monde newspaper, although the tail failed to stop the attack on the soldiers.

Police told the paper that they expected more attacks of this kind.

Earlier on Tuesday French authorities arrested seven men and a woman suspected of involvement in a network to send fighters to Syria.

Cazeneuve said they were not suspected of haivng links to January's Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

The Islamic State armed group on Tuesday issued a new video threatening attacks in France and claiming that it has thousands of supporters ready to carry them out.

It called on Muslims to attack police officers and soldiers with knives.
 

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