An Afghan migrant stabbed to death an Algerian man and wounded another in Bordeaux, southwest France, after he became angry when he saw them drinking alcohol.
Police shot and killed the assailant minutes later as he threatened them with a knife. The incident happened in a central area of Bordeaux popular with tourists early on Wednesday evening.
“The attacker reproached the victims for drinking alcohol during Eid [the Muslim festival marking the end of Ramadan],” Frédérique Porterie, the Bordeaux public prosecutor, told journalists. “They told him it was none of his business, and he punched them before walking away. They threw cans at him and he returned and took out a knife.”
Her account of the frenzied attack, in which the asylum seeker stabbed one of the men nine times, was based on the testimony of the surviving victim and witnesses. The survivor, who was seriously wounded, said neither he nor his companion, from the same village in Algeria, had known the assailant.
Porterie said there was no evidence that it was a terrorist attack despite the apparently religious motive. She said the attacker’s fingerprints matched those of a 25-year-old Afghan listed on a European file of asylum seekers and migrants, but he had not been flagged as a security risk.
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A few minutes earlier he had started a fight with two other men who were drinking rosé wine near the scene of the stabbings, witnesses said.
Less than four months before the Paris Olympics the terrorism alert in France is at its highest level. Last week a 15-year-old Muslim boy was beaten to death after a verbal exchange with a girl outside a school in a Paris suburb. Four suspects have been charged, including two of the girl’s brothers.
In another incident, a Muslim girl was left in a coma after being attacked by a group outside her school in Montpellier, south France. According to her mother, she had been threatened previously and denounced as an infidel for not wearing a headscarf.
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A football match between Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona in Paris on Wednesday night took place under heightened security measures after Islamic State threatened to attack the Champions League quarter-final event.
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France has repeatedly been targeted by militant Islamists since the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in 2015.
