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MARSEILLE, France/WASHINGTON: The Daesh group on Sunday claimed responsibility for a knife attack that killed two women at the main train station in the French Mediterranean city of Marseille.
The monitoring group SITE quoted an Arabic language report on the group’s Amaq propaganda agency that cited a “security source” as saying: “The executor of the stabbing operation in the city of Marseille... is from the soldiers of the Islamic State.”
Police sources said the suspect had shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) in Arabic as he attacked the women, aged 17 and 20, at Marseille’s main railway station.
The attacker, a man believed to be in his 30s, was shot dead by soldiers serving in a special 7,000-strong force known as Sentinelle set up to guard vulnerable areas in terror-hit France.
The latest deaths came with France still on high alert and under a state of emergency following a string of attacks in recent years by extremists linked to the Daesh group or Al-Qaeda.
“We have until now managed to avoid such dramatic incidents (in Marseille). I think it was a terrorist attack and the individual who was killed seems to have had several identities,” Marseille mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin told reporters.
Paris was rocked in 2015 by multiple attacks that killed 130 people. In 2016 a gunman drove a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 people. Both of these attacks were claimed by Daesh (or Islamic State).
Other countries, including Britain, Germany and Belgium, have also suffered attacks by militants using knives, guns, explosives and driving vehicles at crowds.
Some 200 police officers cordoned off the area and all roads were closed to traffic.
Speaking in Marseille, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said the man had initially killed one woman and looked to be running away before returning to attack a second woman and then rush toward soldiers from the Sentinelle force who arrived on the scene quickly and shot him dead.
Two police sources said the attacker had been carrying a butcher’s knife, was around 30 years old and of North African appearance. One source said he was known to police for common law crimes, while another said digital analysis of fingerprints had come up with several aliases.
“This could be an act of terrorism, but we cannot confirm it fully at this stage,” Collomb told reporters.
French troops are part of a US-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and has thousands of soldiers in West Africa fighting Al-Qaeda-linked militants, operations that have made these groups urge their followers to target France.
Security forces have increasingly been targeted by militants in knife attacks. A man wielding a knife attacked a soldier in a Paris metro station on Sept. 15.
President Emmanuel Macron said on Twitter he was “disgusted by this barbaric act” and praised the calmness and efficiency of security forces.
French lawmakers are due to vote on a much-criticized anti-terrorism law on Tuesday, which would see France come out of its state-of-emergency in November, although some of the powers would be enshrined into law.
The number of military personnel on the ground is also due to be reduced slightly, although the force is being adapted to make it more mobile and its movements less predictable.
“The presence of Sentinelle soldiers, their speed and efficiency ensured that the death count was not bigger,” police union official Stephane Battaglia told Reuters.