REPORT: Knifeman yelling "Allahu Akbar" shot dead after killing two in France

Two women were stabbed to death and their assailant shot dead by a soldier in the southern French port city of Marseille on Sunday in what officials described as a "likely terrorist act".
 
Police sources said the suspect had shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) in Arabic as he carried out his attack on the women, aged 17 and 20, at Marseille's main railway station.
 
Two police sources said one had her throat slit while the other was stabbed in the chest and stomach.
 
The assailant was shot dead by a soldier from a military Sentinelle patrol, a force deployed across the country as part of a state of emergency declared after Islamist attacks that began almost two years ago.
 
Paris was rocked in 2015 by multiple attacks that killed 130 people. In 2016 a gunman drove a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 people. Both of these attacks were claimed by Islamic State.
 
Other countries, including Britain, Germany and Belgium, have also suffered attacks using knives, guns, explosives and vehicles.
 
"If the military had not been there, we would have had a lot more deaths," Samia Ghali, lawmaker for the Marseille region, told France Bleu Province radio.
 
French troops are part of a U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and has thousands of soldiers in West Africa fighting al Qaeda-linked militants, operations that have made these groups urge their followers to target France.
 
Some 200 police officers had cordoned off the area and all roads were closed to traffic.

 

A witness told Reuters she saw a man take out a knife from his sleeve and then stab a young girl and then a second woman, shouting what could have been "Allahu Akbar".
 
She added that she saw soldiers from France's Sentinelle force who were patrolling in the area arrive on the public square at the Gare Saint-Charles station.
 
Two police sources said the attacker had been carrying a butcher's knife, was around 30 years old and of North African appearance. One source said he was known to police for common law crimes.
 
"We have generally avoided these sorts of attacks in Marseille," regional president Renaud Muselier, who was speaking from the site of the killings, told BFM TV.
 
"I think the security services responded extremely quickly. It's difficult to do more because when you see the distance between the two bodies and the attacker it's only 10 meters, so they intervened quickly."
 
Security forces have increasingly been targeted by militants who have carried out several knife attacks on them, most notably in June 2016, when a Frenchman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State stabbed a police commander to death outside his home and killed his partner.
 
A man wielding a knife attacked a soldier in a Paris metro station on Sept. 15.
 
President Emmanuel Macron said on Twitter he was "disgusted by this barbaric act" and praised the calmness and efficiency of security forces, including the military.
 
French lawmakers are due to vote on a much-criticized anti-terrorism law on Tuesday, which would see France come out of its state-of-emergency in November, although some of the powers would be enshrined into law.
 
The number of military personnel on the ground is also due to be reduced slightly, although the force is being adapted to make it more mobile and its movements less predictable.
 
"The presence of Sentinelle soldiers, their speed and efficiency ensured that the death count was not bigger," police union official Stephane Battaglia told Reuters.