African Muslim attacks soldiers outside Jewish centre

French police arrested Moussa Koulibaly, an African Muslim who attacked a French army guard in front of a Jewish community centre in a pedestrian zone near the Place Massena in central Nice yesterday.

Koulibaly attacked the soldier with a knife, wounding him badly in the cheek. Two other soldiers from the 54th artillery regiment came to the aid of their comrade, and were also wounded, one in the arm.

The assailant is not related to Amedy Koulibaly, the Islamist gunmen who murdered a policewoman and four Jewish men last month, but he is believed to be of Malian origin.

Koulibaly purchased a one-way ticket from Ajaccio, Corsica, to Istanbul last week. French authorities assumed he was bound for the jihad in Syria, and alerted their Turkish counterparts who sent him back to France.

President François Hollande condemned the attack and promised that “ the motivations and circumstances of this criminal act will be fully elucidated”.

Defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve flew to Nice to visit the wounded soldiers in hospital.

Proselytising aggressively

Moussa Koulibaly holds convictions for armed robbery and drug-dealing and was repeatedly imprisoned in the late 2000s. He came to the attention of police again last December, when he was reportedly “proselytising aggressively” at a sports centre in Mantes-la-Jolie, north of Paris. Police questioned him in January, but had insufficient evidence to detain him.

Police identified and arrested a man who stood next to Koulibaly on a tram in Nice before the attack. The second man did not participate in the knife assault, and is being questioned to determine if he knows Koulibaly. The attack has shaken Nice’s 25,000-strong Jewish community.