A man with severe schizophrenia who had been on a watch list for Islamic radicalism stabbed a police officer at her station Friday in western France and shot two other officers before police killed him, authorities said, according to The Associated Press.
The attacker was a Frenchman in his 40s who had been on a watch list for Islamic radicalism because of his "rigorous" religious practices, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.
The assailant had recently been released from prison and was under monitoring by psychiatric services, added Darmanin.
The three officers were wounded but none is in life-threatening condition, the minister said.
The motive for the violence in the Nantes suburb of La Chapelle-sur-Erdre was unclear, but Darmanin told reporters at the scene that the man "clearly wanted to attack police."
The attacker was born in France and did not have any past convictions for terrorism-related crimes, Darmanin said.
The assailant entered the police station Friday morning saying he had a car problem, Mayor Fabrice Roussel said.
He then stabbed the first police officer inside the station, apparently took her gun and fled, Darmanin said. The officer was wounded in the leg and hand.
French police deployed helicopters, search dogs and more than 200 officers to find the suspect who fired on officers trying to arrest him when located.
The suspect was gravely wounded in an ensuing shootout, and died later of his injuries, according to a police official.
France has been hit by a number of attacks claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS) in recent years, the biggest one being the attack in November of 2015 in which 129 people were murdered.
Last month, a female police administrator was stabbed in the neck at a police station in Rambouillet, southwest of Paris by an attacker who shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the stabbing.
In October of 2020, a man stabbed three people to death at the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice. He was later handed terror murder charges.
The same month, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by a Chechen man in a suburb of Paris after showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a class on freedom of speech.
A month earlier, a 25-year-old man wounded two people in a meat cleaver attack in Paris. He was subsequently charged with "attempted murder with relation to a terrorist enterprise."
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)