French police say six people are now in custody over deadly stabbings in Nice
Two more men were arrested in connection with a knife attack that left three dead in a church in Nice, bringing the number of people detained to six as investigators look at the suspected known attacker’s last known contacts, a French police source said.
The latest arrests took place on Saturday, the source said.
An assailant shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people in a church in Nice on Thursday in France’s second deadly two-week knife attack with a suspected Islamist motive.
The suspected attacker, a 21-year-old from Tunisia, was shot by police and is now in critical condition in a hospital.
The latest arrests in the case involved two men from the town of Grasse near the southern French coast near Nice, BFM TV reported.
>> A day after the fatal church attack in Nice, here’s what we know so far
France’s main accusation of terrorism has said that the man suspected of carrying out the Nice attack had arrived in Europe on September 20 in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia.
Investigators in Italy are also intensifying inquiries about the movements and contacts of the suspected attacker on the island of Sicily. They believe he may have spent time there after traveling from Lampedusa to Bari in early October on a ship used for quarantine immigrants, legal sources said.
In Bari, he is believed to have been handed a deportation order forcing him to leave Italy within a week, legal sources said. Investigators are investigating the possibility that the suspected attacker stayed in the Sicilian city of Alcamo for a 10-day period, the sources added.
(REUTERS)
