PARIS - A Syrian refugee armed with a knife stabbed four preschool children and injured two adults by a lake in the French Alps on Thursday in an attack whose motive remains unclear.
The youngest victim in the quiet town of Annecy was just 22 months old and investigators are trying to understand the reasons for the frenzied morning rampage in a sunny public park.
The attacker, dressed in black and carrying a blade around 10 centimetres long, could be heard shouting "in the name of Jesus Christ" on a video taken by a bystander and seen by AFP.
"There's no obvious terrorist motive," local prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis told reporters at a press conference alongside Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who rushed to the lakeside town around 30 kilometres south of the Swiss city of Geneva.
Borne said the suspect was "not known by any intelligence service" and did not have "any history of psychiatric problems".
Recently divorced and in his early 30s, he had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife told AFP.
"He called me around four months ago. He was living in a church," his ex-wife said on condition of anonymity, saying he had left Sweden because he had been unable to get Swedish nationality.
Witnesses described him running around the park on the banks of Lake Annecy wearing a bandana and sunglasses, apparently attacking people at random.
Armed police arrested him at the scene.
"He wanted to attack everyone. I moved away and he lunged at an old man and woman and stabbed the old man," former professional footballer Anthony Le Tallec, who was running in the park, told the local Dauphine Libere newspaper.
- Traumatic attacks -
All four child victims, which include British and German boys, are in a critical state in a local hospital.
"We have already deployed British consular officials who are travelling to the area to make themselves available to support the family," British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told a press conference during a trip to Paris.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said "Germany is shocked by this odious and despicable attack in Annecy which also affected a German child."
French President Emmanuel Macron called the violence an "attack of absolute cowardice".
France has suffered a series of traumatic attacks in the last decade or so, most of them by Islamic extremists.
In 2012, a Franco-Algerian Islamic extremist named Mohamed Merah killed seven people, including three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in the southern city of Toulouse.
Most recently, the beheading of a teacher in broad daylight in 2020 near his school in a Paris suburb by a radicalised Chechen refugee led to shock and grief, as well as a national debate about the influence of radical Islam in deprived areas of the country.
- Immigration -
Thursday's attack spurred fresh scrutiny of France's immigration and asylum policy, with right-wing politicians seizing on the culprit's identity as a refugee.
"The investigation will determine what happened, but it seems like the culprit has the same profile that you see often in these attacks," the head of the right-wing Republicans party, Eric Ciotti, told reporters at parliament.
Amid a spate of violent incidents around the country and growing fear about crime, Macron recently said France was undergoing a process of "de-civilisation" -- a title of a book by a notorious far-right ideologue, Renaud Camus.
The comments echoed those in 2020 by hardline Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who said France was "turning savage".
He had been attending a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg on Thursday where the bloc was trying to reach an agreement on a long-stalled revision of rules to more equally share the hosting of asylum seekers and migrants.
Darmanin is also drafting a new immigration law for France which he hopes will include tougher measures to deport foreign nationals while offering more legal routes to visas for unskilled workers.
By Daniel Abelous With Sylvie Maligorne In Paris