Three dead as woman beheaded in knife attack in French Church at Nice

Paris, Oct 29: Three persons have been killed and several others injured in a knife attack in the French city of Nice. One woman was decapitated in the attack.

Mayor Christian Estrosi said on Twitter that the knife attack took place in or near the city Notre Dame Church. The police have detained the attacker. The police said that three persons were confirmed to have died in the attack.

One of the people killed inside the Church was believed to be the Church warden. The attacker kept shouting Allahu Akbar, Estrosi said. The attackers was shot by the police while being detained. He is in hospital and alive, Estrosi also said.

The incident comes at a time when France is still reeling from the beheading earlier month of a French middle school teacher, Samuel Paty by a man of Chechen origin.

The cause of the latest attack is not immediately known. It is also unclear if the attack is connected to the cartoons, which the Muslims consider to be blasphemous.

Following the beheading of Paty, President Emmanuel Macron promised that France will not renounce freedoms taught by a schoolteacher beheaded by a radical Islamist last week after showing caricatures of the prophet of Islam to his class.

At a national memorial at the Sorbonne University in central Paris, Macron praised history teacher Samuel Paty as the "face of the Republic" who "believed in knowledge."

Paty, 47, was murdered on Friday by an 18-year-old of Chechen origin who had become radicalised. He was in turn shot dead by police.