Islamic terror groups praise recent terrorist attacks on France
On October 29, 2020, three people were killed in a stabbing attack at Notre-Dame de Nice, a Roman Catholic basilica in Nice, France. The suspect, identified as Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian, was shot by the police. Aouissaoui who had a copy of the Quran and three knives with him, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) when approached by police who shot and seriously wounded him, France’s anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard told a press conference.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi characterized the attack in his city as a terrorist incident. He said it was again the victim of what he called “Islamo-fascism.” He said the suspect, taken to a hospital after being wounded during a police arrest, did not stop saying “Allahu Akbar” during his detention.
French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the attack and said, “If we are attacked once again it is for the values which are ours: freedom, for the possibility on our soil to believe freely and not to give in to any spirit of terror. I say it with great clarity once again today: we won’t surrender anything.”
The Nice attack took after the murder of Samuel Paty, a French middle-school teacher on October 16, 2020 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb of Paris. The perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Muslim Russian-born refugee of Chechen descent, killed and beheaded Paty with a 30-centimetre knife. Anzorov was shot and killed by police minutes later.
The French President Emmanuel Macron gave France’s highest civilian award, the Legion of Honour, to Paty and said he had been killed by “cowards” for representing the secular, democratic values of the French Republic. “He was killed because Islamists want our future,” Macron said.
“They will never have it.” “Our fellow citizens expect actions,” Macron said and promised that the government will intensify a crackdown on radical Islam.
Islamic terror groups have praised the spate of terror attacks in France. The ISIS praised the Nice attacks on RocketChat.
According to the terrorism monitoring website, Counter Extremism Project (CEP), the ISIS supporters on RocketChat praised the attack and shared photos of Aouissaoui and a video allegedly from the aftermath of the assault showing emergency personnel recovering a body.
The ISIS published a full-page article in Al Naba featuring an image of Nice attack and giving threatening calls to France.
Al Shabab called the terrorists who perpetrated the France attacks as “gallant knights” who “have treaded the path of the noble companions in dealing with those who malign our religion.” The terror group then advised others to follow in those footsteps as well in a “war” against secularism, naming recent attackers in France “and the other unknown soldiers of Allah.”
“Killing the one who insults the Prophet is the right of every Muslim capable of applying it,” the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) declared in its statement, which told would-be jihadists to “not ask for authorization to kill the one who insults the Prophet” but to mind Sharia law and “spare those whom it is illegitimate to target.”
Source: New Delhi Times
