According to sources in Algeria obtained by Le Figaro, the victim was sitting on the terrace of a café when a man pounced on her, slit her throat with a stabbing weapon and shouted ‘Allah Akbar’. According to our sources, the fleeing attacker was caught by members of the public.
A video circulating on social media shows the suspected attacker lying on the ground, wearing black jogging bottoms and a grey T-shirt. Surrounding him, Algerians film him and shout: ‘Handcuff him, handcuff him’.
The motives for this attack – an operation by an armed Islamist group active in the region or an individual act by a radical who wants to mess with the Westerners – are still unclear.
The attack is reminiscent of the attack on French citizen Hervé Gourdel in 2014. The 55-year-old mountain guide was kidnapped in Algeria in September 2014 by the Jund al-Khilafa group, which belongs to the Islamic State (IS) group, while he was on a trekking tour in Kabylia. The terrorists had granted then French President François Hollande 24 hours to stop the airstrikes in Iraq before beheading their hostage. Le Figaro