French Catholics on Sunday
celebrated the All Saints religious festival under heavy security, as police
made two new arrests over an attack on a church in the southern city of Nice
blamed on an Islamist knife man.

Three people were killed in
the knife rampage on Thursday in the Notre-Dame Basilica that prosecutors say
was carried out by a young Tunisian recently arrived in Europe.

It was the latest attack in
France to be described by the government as an act of “Islamist”
terror, in the wake of the republication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed by
the Charlie Hebdo weekly in September.

Also Read: Emmanuel Macron seeks to calm tensions with Muslims

In Nice, three men were
released from police custody on Sunday after authorities determined they were
not linked to the suspected attacker Brahim Issaoui, a source close to the
investigation said.

Three men remain in custody,
including a 29-year-old Tunisian suspected of migrating with Issaoui from their
homeland to France.

The tensions did not prevent
Catholics from going to church and celebrate the All Saints holiday in Nice,
authorities allowing an exemption during the coronavirus lockdown.

“I was apprehensive, I
was scared of coming,” said Claudia, 49, as she went to church, reassured
by the presence of heavily armed soldiers.

“We need to show that we
are not scared and we are here,” she said, following several other
worshippers into the church, where around 150 people attended an early evening
mass, honoring the three victims.

Issaoui was shot by police
multiple times and is currently in a serious condition in hospital.
Investigators have been unable to question him and his precise motivations
remain unclear.

But Interior Minister Gerald
Darmanin said that Issaoui “had clearly gone there (to Nice) to
kill”.

“Otherwise how can we
explain why he armed himself with several knifes having only just arrived? He
clearly did not come just to get his papers,” Darmanin told the Voix du
Nord newspaper.

Investigators believe Issaoui
travelled to Europe via Italy’s Mediterranean island of Lampedusa on September
20.

 The 21-year-old arrived at the mainland
Italian port of Bari on October 9 before arriving Nice just two days before the
attack.

The latest men to be
detained, aged 25 and 63, were arrested Saturday at the residence of the
29-year-old Tunisian, who was arrested earlier in the day, a judicial source
told AFP.

The detained Tunisian is
“suspected of mixing with” Issaoui during their journey to Europe, adding
he also likely arrived in France recently, the source close to the
investigation told AFP.

France is on edge after the
republication in early September of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed by Charlie
Hebdo, which was followed by an attack outside its former offices, the
beheading of a teacher and the attack in Nice.

On Saturday, an attacker
armed with a sawn-off shotgun shot a Greek Orthodox priest before fleeing in
the French city of Lyon.

Nikolaos Kakavelaki, 52, was
closing his church when he was attacked and is now in a serious condition.

A suspect was initially
detained, but was released on Sunday after investigators found no evidence he
was connected to the shooting.

Also Read: Anti-France protests draw thousands in Asia, Middle East

Prosecutors say they are
keeping all hypotheses open but so far have not referred the case to
anti-terror colleagues.

French President Emmanuel
Macron had vowed after the beheading earlier this month of teacher Samuel Paty,
who showed his class a cartoon of the prophet that France would never renounce
the right to caricature.

This comment prompted a storm
of anger in the Muslim world, with furious protests held in numerous countries.

In Pakistan’s commercial hub
of Karachi on Sunday, protesters outside the French consulate burnt images of
Macron and tread on the French flag, an AFP photographer said.

Macron sought to quell the
anger by saying in an interview with an Arab TV channel on Saturday that he
could understand Muslims could be shocked by the cartoons.

On Sunday, French Prime
Minister Jean Castex lashed out at previous “complacency” over the
“ideological battle” against radical Islamism.

“I want to denounce here
all the compromises that have been made for too many years, the justifications
for radical Islamism: ‘we should flagellate ourselves, regret colonization,”
he told TF1 television.

“The first way to win a
war is for the nation to come together, be united, proud of our origins, of our
identity, of our Republic, of our freedom.

We must win this ideological
battle, it’s over, no more complacency from intellectuals, political parties,
we must all be united on the basis of our values, on the basis of our
history.” he said