“Cathedral lovers” pilgrims, community leaders, math teachers with students… Thursday’s stabbing attack on a playground near Lake Annecy brought to light some of the heroes met by President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
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• Also read: “Run! Run!”: A man sows terror in a park in Annecy, France
• Also read: Knife attack in France: Six injured, including four small children, one man arrested
Among them, Henri, 24, is the most popular on social media. In video authenticated by AFP, we see him trying to stop the attacker with his backpack as the man attacks the children, then chasing him as he tries to flee.
“Pray for the children, I’m fine,” Henri said in a message posted to his Instagram account, le chant des Cathédrales, on Thursday, where he described himself as “a lover of cathedrals, nine months on foot.” presented by France”.
The hashtag #MerciHenri, which pays tribute to the “backpack hero,” is popular on the accounts of far-right activists. “I behaved as every Frenchman should behave,” he told Cnews on Friday.
“I didn’t even think about it. The brain really switched off, for me it was just impossible to let someone who looked like a madman attack defenseless beings like that,” he then explained on the BFM channel.
“I felt like he wasn’t a person in his normal state, that there was something very bad going on inside him and that it was imperative to stop him.” […] We trade what we have as best we can, so there was my little backpack that I carried in front of me.”
The mayor of Annecy, a peaceful town in the French Alps, François Astorg, on Thursday commended “the courage” of two city officials working in the park and “attempted to arrest the attacker as he committed his crimes”.
“We were just about to empty containers when we heard screams from the kindergarten. “People were calling for help,” one of the two road workers reports in the regional daily Le Dauphiné Libéré
“We saw the guy coming towards us. He was dressed all in black with his scarf over his head. Together with my colleague, we took what we had on hand: a shovel. And we went to meet him. My colleague tried to knock him down or disarm him with the shovel, but he was strong and quick. We could see his knife clearly. He tried to stab my colleague, the blade flying inches from his face. “We had to step back,” he says.
From this episode he keeps a regret: “It’s a pity we didn’t make it with the shovel …”.
For her part, Eulalie, a 17-year-old student met by AFP in the park, recalls the role of her math teacher, “who was great because he was direct.”
“He intervened along with another gentleman who was holding a bag,” and she says this distracted the attacker and potentially saved children. For his part, his first reaction was, “Call Samu, firefighters”: “We’re not running, we’re trying to be efficient, my brain reacts like this, it’s unique to everyone.”