Four young children have been stabbed in a park near Lake Annecy, in France’s south-east. Police overpowered and arrested the knifeman, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said.
Authorities said the children were aged three or younger and were in a critical condition.
UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said that one of the injured children was a British national. One of the other children is Dutch.
Police have confirmed that the suspect is a 31-year-old Syrian, who had refugee status in Sweden.
Regional deputy Antoine Armand described the attack as “abominable” and said authorities were investigating but knew “very little”.
Video footage of the attack uploaded to social media shows a little playground, with life going on as normal. Children are running around, and their parents and minders are there.
Then a man comes in with a knife, and very quickly there are screams. He’s clearly looking for children to attack – and he attacks one in a pushchair.
In part of the video, life is going on as normal, and in another part, there is a man wandering around with a knife. You can see he is actively looking for children.
French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and Mr Darmanin went to the scene of the attack.
Ms Borne told a news conference that four children and two adults were injured, with some of them in intensive care.
The attacker has “no criminal or psychiatric record” and has a child “aged around the same age as those he attacked”, she said.
Annecy prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis told reporters that the young victims ranged from 22 months old to three years, adding that the children were in a “severe state”.
One of the adults was seriously injured and the other only slightly, she added.
There “doesn’t seem to be any kind of terrorist motivation”, she said.
“Their state of health is extremely fragile, today they are still in absolute emergency”, the prosecutor said, adding that an attempted murder investigation is underway.
Police say the suspect has refugee status in Sweden and recently came to France, leaving behind a wife and three-year-old daughter. In an application last year for refugee status in France, he said he was a Syrian Christian.
During the incident, the attacker invoked the name of Jesus Christ.
A woman identified as his ex-wife told BFM TV that her former partner was a Christian.
“He does not call me for four months. [Our relationship] stopped because we lived in Sweden and he did not want to live in Sweden anymore,” she said, adding that he had not previously shown a violent streak.
In recent years, France has become accustomed to knife attacks, often carried out by solitary young men with backgrounds in petty crime and some Islamist connection. It is clear that this attack is of a different nature.
So far, most politicians are being careful not to leap to conclusions, but it is inevitable that the attack will feed into the debate on immigration.
The suspect is said to have attacked the children – some in pushchairs – as they visited the park, before fleeing the scene and stabbing an elderly man nearby.
Police intervened and the perpetrator was shot in the legs.
France’s National Assembly has observed a minute of silence and roads are blocked around the scene of the attack.
President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that the nation was in “shock” over the “act of cowardice”.
Mr Cleverly said that British consular officials were travelling to the area “to support the family” of the injured child.
“We stand in strong solidarity with the people of France at this terrible time,” he said at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
Former Liverpool football player Anthony le Tallec was on a run in the town at the time of the attack. He said he heard people yelling “Run! Run!” and watched as the police chased the alleged attacker down after attacking an elderly man.
He said he then continued his run along the lake, where he saw the injured children on the ground.
“It’s crazy to have this in Annecy,” he said.
He also claimed there was a delay before the police shot the man with the knife.
Another woman, Eleanor Vincent, told the BBC she “knew something horrible had happened” as she approached the lake.
“People were going about their business or on their holiday, as I was, and it’s just shocking. I have no other way of describing it.” BBC