By Aurelien Breeden

PARIS — A knife-wielding man stabbed four children and two adults at a park in southeastern France on Thursday (8), in an attack that horrified the country and that President Emmanuel Macron called “absolutely cowardly”.

French authorities said that a suspect, a Syrian asylum-seeker, had been arrested in the attack, which took place in Annecy, a city of about 130,000 people in the French Alps. The incident was not being treated as a terrorist incident so far, authorities said.

But the brazen stabbing of very young children — whose ages ranged from 22 months to 3 years — shattered a peaceful morning in one of Annecy’s bucolic lakeside parks. It quickly sparked revulsion and outrage in France, where past attacks have left deep scars. Most of the wounded were hospitalized with serious injuries.

“The nation is in shock,” Macron said on Twitter.

Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, who hurried to Annecy after the stabbings, said that the victims were “savagely attacked”.

“We are shocked by this heinous, unspeakable act,” Borne told reporters in the city. “When children are affected, I think we are all deeply touched.”

Line Bonnet-Mathis, the city’s public prosecutor, said the suspect was being questioned by police but that there was “no apparent sign of a terrorist motive”.

The attack occurred just before 10:00 a.m. in an area with two parks, Les Jardins de l’Europe and Le Pâquier, that borders a glacier-formed lake surrounded by mountains.

Anthony Le Tallec, a former professional soccer player in Annecy, said in an Instagram story from the park, where he filmed police officers and emergency services at the scene, that he had been jogging on the lakefront when he saw dozens of people running in the other direction.

“There was a mom who told me, ‘Run! Someone is stabbing everyone. He stabbed children,’” Le Tallec said. He then moved out of the way as the assailant, being chased by the police, ran toward him, he said. The attacker rushed up to an older man nearby and stabbed him, Le Tallec added.

“It’s crazy to see this in Annecy,” he said.

Borne, the prime minister, told reporters that the suspect was a homeless Syrian man who had obtained refugee status in Sweden a decade ago. The man had also applied for asylum in France, she said, but he was refused because of his existing status in Sweden.

Borne said that the suspect had no criminal record, had never been flagged by French intelligence services and had no known psychiatric disorders.

Bonnet-Mathis, the prosecutor, said that the assailant had been armed with a single knife but that one of the adult victims was also hit by a bullet when the police fired at the attacker to try to stop him.

Laurent Wauquiez, who presides over the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the region that includes Annecy, told reporters that he had spoken with traumatized bystanders. The attack happened as families were pushing children in strollers and high school students were exercising nearby.

“Everyone is extremely shocked,” Wauquiez said. “It’s a garden. There is a school right nearby, facing a lake that is a haven of peace. Nobody can imagine this barbarity.”

A woman who said she saw the attack told a local radio station that the assailant had jumped over a park fence and stabbed a small girl and a baby in a stroller. “I really thought it was a joke, but not at all,” the woman, who was not identified, told France Bleu radio. “When I heard the mother’s scream, I started to run.”

One of the children injured was British, according to James Cleverly, the British foreign secretary, who was speaking at a news conference in Paris at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Another of the injured was Dutch, according to Bonnet-Mathis.

France’s lower house of Parliament observed a minute of silence after news broke of the attack, briefly interrupting fiery debates among lawmakers on Macron’s pension overhaul.

Terrorist attacks have receded from the headlines in France in recent years, but the country is still on high alert, and authorities say that police and intelligence services regularly foil plots.

France was struck by large-scale Islamist terrorist attacks in 2015 and in 2016, followed by a string of smaller but still deadly shootings and stabbings in subsequent years, often carried out by lone assailants.

In April, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on the news channel BFMTV that the security forces had thwarted 41 potential terrorist attacks since 2017, including about a dozen since 2020, and that most of them had been planned by people with radical Islamist views.

Attacks specifically targeting children are rare in France.

In 1993, a masked gunman held toddlers hostage for two days at their kindergarten in a suburb of Paris, but he ultimately released them unharmed before he was killed by police officers. And in 2012, a radical Islamist gunman went on a shooting spree in and around the southwestern city of Toulouse, killing a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school. The police fatally shot the attacker several days later.

-New York Times