His voice is confident and surprisingly poised. Presumably still in shock from what she experienced, boosted by adrenaline, sister Marie-Claude recounted the terrible knife attack she suffered on Sunday in a church in Nice (Alpes-Maritimes).
Shortly before the 10 a.m. service, a man entered the Saint-Pierre-d’Arène church, carrying “several stab wounds to the priest”, explained Maud Marty, deputy public prosecutor of Nice, from the site of the attack. “We were preparing the service. I heard an abnormal noise at the entrance to the church then I saw the father slumped over. I saw this man, whom I had already met, close to him. He was hitting him with a knife in the legs, ”she tells our colleagues from RTL.
The nun then explains that she arrested the young man. “If you approach, I’ll kill you!” he threatens. I then tried to grab the knife and he managed to turn it against my hand,” severing a tendon. She then went out to call for help in the street. “I was bleeding a lot, Father Krzysztof was on the ground”, details the nun
According to the prosecution, the priest, mainly injured in the chest, was transferred to the CHU Pasteur in the city but his vital prognosis is not engaged. “He has his fingers severed, he will be very disabled”, continues the witness and victim, who was also slightly injured in one hand, while trying to intervene.
“The boy stopped. I do not know how. I think with the grace of the Lord, because it is regularly asked for. I think there was a supernatural intervention that stopped him because he had everything to both stab me in the carotid artery or in the heart and the same for Father Christophe. He stopped. Why ? I don’t know,” she wonders again.
The victim of the attack is Father Krzysztof Rudzinski, a priest of Polish origin seconded for more than ten years from his diocese in Poland to this parish in Nice, where he supports the parish priest of the church, said the other vicar. , Yves-Marie Lequin.
He wanted to “kill Macron”
The alleged assailant, aged 31, struck his victim with a blade of about ten centimeters. He was quickly arrested and placed in police custody, but this was lifted in the evening, for medical reasons, with the hospitalization of the defendant in a psychiatric unit, we learned from the public prosecutor. Republic of Nice, Xavier Bonhomme.
“The investigation is continuing under the direction of the Nice prosecutor’s office, the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office (Pnat) not seizing itself,” added the latter. The investigations, for attempted murder and intentional violence with a weapon, were entrusted to the judicial police of Nice, he said during the day.
“The motives for the act are to this day and at this time difficult to establish”, had insisted the prosecutor, specifying that the aggressor was not known on the judicial level and was followed psychiatrically.
From a police source, this man, named Kevin, of French nationality and born in Fréjus (Var), is “obviously bipolar” and his gesture would have “no a priori terrorist character”: “He spontaneously declared to the police that he was of the Jewish faith and that on this election day, he wanted to kill Macron and that he had finally fallen back on a church”.
This man would have made “several stays in a psychiatric hospital, at the Sainte-Marie hospital in Nice”, according to the mayor of the city Christian Estrosi, also on the spot.