Police said a woman was beheaded by an attacker with a knife who also killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice, one of those killed was the caretaker at the basilica. The suspect was detained shortly after the attack.

Nice, France: Three people have been killed in a knife attack in the French city of Nice, police said.

Police said a woman was beheaded by an attacker with a knife who also killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice, one of those killed was the caretaker at the basilica. The suspect was detained shortly after the attack.

France’s national anti-terror prosecutors opened a murder inquiry. The Nice mayor told media that the suspect had “repeated endlessly ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is greatest) when he was being treated at the scene”.

The interior minister appealed to people to avoid the area in the center of the French Riviera city.

Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi said everything pointed to a “terrorist attack at the heart of the Notre-Dame basilica”.

Earlier, Nice was targeted in a deadliest attack in recent years, when a 31-year-old Tunisian drove a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on 14 July 2016, killing 86 people.

The attack comes while France is still reeling from the beheading earlier this month of French teacher Samuel Paty in Paris by a man of Chechen origin.

It was not immediately clear what the motive was for the Nice attack, or if there was any connection to the cartoons, which Muslims consider to be blasphemous.

After Paty’s killing, French officials and ordinary citizens have re-asserted the right to display the cartoons, and the images have been widely displayed at marches in solidarity with the killed teacher.

That has prompted an outpouring of anger in parts of the Muslim world, with some governments accusing French leader Emmanuel Macron of pursuing an anti-Islam agenda.

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