fr24news– A police officer was injured after being stabbed with a knife in Cannes, in the south of France, and his attacker was “neutralized”, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Monday.
The policeman was driving a car in front of a police station at 6.30 a.m. when the assailant opened the vehicle door and stabbed him with a knife, a police source told AFP speaking under cover. anonymity.
The officer was saved thanks to his bulletproof vest, sources said.
The assailant was seriously injured by another police officer and was in serious condition. According to French media, the suspect is an Algerian national with an Italian residence permit. The suspect was born in 1984 and was unknown to French authorities, according to media reports.
The sources said police viewed the incident as a possible terrorist attack.
French police have been the target of a series of attacks by Islamist extremists in recent years, leading to calls for better protection and harsher prison sentences.
On April 23, a police administrative assistant was killed when an attacker stabbed her at the entrance to a police station in the Paris suburb of Rambouillet. The assailant, a 36-year-old Tunisian national, was shot dead by security forces.
In October 2019, three agents and an employee of the Paris police were stabbed to death at the Paris police headquarters by a radicalized computer scientist.
Each attack has sharpened attention to the danger of Islamic extremism in France, which has suffered a wave of violence over the past decade from radicals inspired by Al Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS) group.
