A woman shouting “Allahu Akbar!” has been detained after wounding two people with a box cutter in southern France.
The attack was carried out a supermarket in La Seyne-sur-Mer, with one of the victims hospitalised with a chest injury, the Associated Press reports.
The attacker has now been detained, and while Toulon prosecutor Bernard Marchal has not revealed the full details of the incident it appears to bear some hallwarks of a radical Islamic terror attack.
The most serious incident of this kind involving box cutters was the September 11th terror attack in 2001, which saw four groups of migrants armed with the tools hijack domestic airliners in the United States.
Three were crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon building, killing almost 3,000 people and injuring over 6,000.
The Associated Press was criticised for erroneously reporting that the attacker shouted “God is great” — including quotating marks — in a social media bulletin breaking the news, rather than “Allahu Akbar”.
“This is why people don’t trust mainstream media anymore,” commented Brexit campaign leader and former UKIP chief Nigel Farage.
Most scholars agree “Allahu Akbar” does not, in fact, translate to “God is great”, but rather “[Our god] is greater”, as in “[Our god] is greater than every other great [being]”.
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