‘We will not give any ground,’ Macron says after terror killings at church

A man wielding a knife killed three people at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday, slitting the throat of a woman in what President Emmanuel Macron called an “terrorist attack.”

The assailant, who was shot and wounded by police, was identified as Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian migrant who arrived in Italy late last month and then travelled to France, sources close to the inquiry said in an AFP report.

According to Reuters, President Emmanuel Macron, declaring that France had been subject to a terrorist attack, said he would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect important French sites, such as places of worship and schools.

Speaking from the scene, he said France had been attacked “over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief.”

“And I say it with lots of clarity again today: we will not give any ground.”

After the Nice attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex raised France’s security alert to its highest level.

In Paris, lawmakers in the National Assembly observed a minute’s silence.

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said the people of Nice “can count on the support of the city of Paris and of Parisians.”

A representative of the French Council for the Muslim Faith condemned the attack.

Within hours of the Nice attack, French police killed a man who had threatened passersby with a handgun in Montfavet, near the southern city of Avignon.