Four children wounded in knife attack in French Alps

A man armed with a knife stabbed four preschool children and injured two adults by a lake in the French Alps on Thursday in an attack that sent shock waves through the country.

The suspect is a Syrian in his early 30s who was granted refugee status in Sweden in April, a police source told AFP. He was arrested at the scene.

Video of him taken by a bystander in Annecy, a town 30 kilometers south of the Swiss city of Geneva, shows him dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt and shorts while holding a small blade.

Witnesses described the knifeman running around a public park on the banks of Lake Annecy in a frenzy, apparently attacking people at random, before he was shot by police.

“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.

Two of the young children and an adult victim were in critical condition, a security source told AFP.

The local Haute-Savoie authority said there were “six victims, including four children” in a statement on Twitter.

French President Emmanuel Macron called it an “attack of absolute cowardice”.

“The nation is shocked. Our thoughts are with (the victims) as well as their families and the emergency services,” he wrote on Twitter.