Three dead in knife attack in France's Nice; mayor says 'everything points' to terrorism

French anti-terrorism prosecutors are investigating a knife attack at a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice that left three people dead. The attack

The prosecutor’s office and national police said that an investigation was opened into an attack with a terrorist connection after Thursday’s stabbing.

An attacker armed with a knife killed three people at a church Thursday in the Mediterranean city of Nice, authorities said.

The killings mark the third attack since the opening in September of a terrorism trial in the January 2015 killings at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.

The assailant was wounded by police and hospitalised after the killings at the Notre Dame Church, less than a kilometer (half-mile) from the site in 2016 where another attacker plowed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd, killing dozens.

Thursday's attacker was believed to be acting alone and police are not searching for other assailants, said two police officials, who were not authorised to be publicly named.

“He cried ‘Allah Akbar!' over and over, even after he was injured,” said Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi, who told BFM television that three people had died, two inside the church and a third who fled but was mortally wounded. “The meaning of his gesture left no doubt.”

Interior minister Gérald Darmanin appealed to people to avoid the area in the centre of the French Riviera city. He said he was convening a crisis meeting at the ministry in Paris, as per a report on BBC.

In Nice, images on French media showed the neighborhood locked down and surrounded by police and emergency vehicles. Sounds of explosions could be heard as sappers exploded suspicious objects.

The lower house of parliament suspended a debate on France's new virus restrictions and held a moment of silence Thursday for the victims. The prime minister rushed from the hall to a crisis center overseeing the aftermath of the Nice attack. French President Emmanuel Macron was headed to Nice later in the day.

The incident comes as France is under high alert for terrorist attacks and as the country is reeling from the gruesome beheading of a history teacher in a street in a Paris suburb less than two weeks ago. The French middle school teacher had showed caricatures of Prophet Mohammad for a class on free speech.

Those caricatures were published by Charlie Hebdo and cited by the men who gunned down the newspaper's editorial meeting in 2015.

The beheading of Samuel Paty has sparked outrage in France and memories of a wave of Islamist violence in 2015 sparked by the same caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo.

In September, a man who had sought asylum in France attacked bystanders outside Charlie Hebdo's former offices with a butcher knife.

With inputs from agencies