Paris: French Police have arrested a third suspect believed to be connected to a man who killed three people with a knife at a church in the southern French city of Nice, media said Saturday.
LCI news channel cited a judicial source as saying that the 33-year-old was the cousin of a man arrested earlier. The third suspect was detained at the home of the latter on Friday evening.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi said a man wielding a knife attacked people who visited the Notre-Dame Basilica on Thursday.
The attacker carried the documents of a 21-year-old Tunisian who came to France through Italy earlier in October. He repeatedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) during the attack. An anti-terror probe is underway.
Read:| New arrest after France church attack, security tightened
Residents in Nice have been mourning for the victims of a gruesome attack by a Tunisian man who killed three people in a French church, following religious and geopolitical tensions around cartoons mocking the Muslim prophet.
The attack in which a knife-wielding Tunisian man carrying a copy of the Quran killed three people at a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice, was the third in less than two months that French authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists, including the beheading of a teacher who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class after the images were re-published by satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
The images, republished to mark the opening of the trial for the deadly 2015 attack against the publication, have stirred the ire of Muslims across the world who consider depictions of the prophet blasphemous.
Investigators in France, Tunisia and Italy are trying to determine the motive of chief suspect Ibrahim Issaoui and whether he acted alone and whether he premeditated Thursday’s attack on the Notre Dame Basilica.
Authorities have labelled the attack an act of Islamist terrorism.
Issaoui, who transited through Italy last month en route to France, is in critical condition in a French hospital after being wounded by police as they arrested him.
Read:| France opens terror probe as church stabbing kills 3
Meanwhile, the family members of Issaoui have expressed their shock.
While investigators sought to develop a picture of Thursday's attacker, identified as Ibrahim Issaoui, they detained a second suspect, a 47-year-old man believed to have been in contact with Issaoui the night before, according to a judicial official.
The family of Ibrahim Issaoui, who was injured and hospitalised, said they wanted to know "the truth."
(with Agency inputs)
