France remains on edge after latest security scares

A jittery France underwent repeated security scares on Tuesday, four days after a Tunisian lorry driver killed 84 people in Nice.

At the same time, the National Assembly prepared to vote on a six-month extension of the state of emergency on Tuesday night. The Senate must also approve the measure.

In the most serious incident, at a holiday village in the alps, a mother and three daughters from the Nantes region were stabbed by a man with a folding pocket knife at breakfast.

The aggressor was named by Dauphine Libéré newspaper as Mohamed Boufarkouch (37), who was born in Morocco and lives in the Yvelines department outside Paris.

Raphael Balland, the prosecutor of the Hautes-Alpes, told a press conference, “The first question is: Is it a terrorist act? We don’t know yet.”

The mother and two daughters, age 12 and 14, were taken to hospital in Gap. The youngest daughter, aged 8, was more seriously wounded and was taken by helicopter to Grenoble. Her life is not in danger.

The stabbing occurred the day after Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack with an axe and a knife by an Afghan youth against train passengers in Bavaria.

Mr Balland denied rumours that Boufarkouch said he attacked the woman and girls because they were scantily clothed. A local official from the extreme right-wing Front national (FN) was denounced by the local representative in the National Assembly for repeating the story.

In Paris, a man wearing a white Arab robe sowed panic when he set down a suitcase in front of the gates to the école militaire, then prayed in a nearby street. He is a Brazilian citizen and was incoherent when questioned by police.

The Moroccan who stabbed the mother and daughters and the incoherent Brazilian are undergoing psychiatric examinations.

It was also revealed that police had arrested a 23-year-old driver and his 20-year-old passenger in Sucy-en-Brie, east of Paris, overnight from Sunday to Monday.

The young man was the driver of a “véhicule de tourisme avec chauffeur”, as Uber and other non-official taxis are known. He had a police record for burglaries. Police said they found detonators, four dynamite sticks and “documents that seemed to indicate radicalisation”. The young man had recently let his beard grow.

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed 84 people in Nice, let his beard grow shortly before his crime.

The killer’s widow, who was in the process of divorcing him, was forced to move house because she received threats after police held her in custody from Friday until Sunday, her lawyer said.

President Francois Hollande defended his record on security before the French community in Lisbon, saying “I must ensure the protection of the country”. It was “the honour and duty of France” to “fight terrorism, fanaticism, fundamentalism”, he said.

Mr Hollande earlier accepted right-wing demands that the state of emergency, adopted on the night of the November 13th, 2015, attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, be extended not for three months, as the government requested, but until late January 2017.