Authorities in southern France have detained a Moroccan man they said stabbed a woman and her three daughters at an Alps resort.
Jean-Marc Duprat, the deputy mayor for the town of Laragne-Montéglin in the Hautes-Alpes region, said the mother and her girls, aged eight, 12 and 14, were on holiday at a nearby resort when a man from a neighbouring apartment attacked them on Tuesday morning as they ate their breakfast.
All four were expected to recover, he said.
Mr Duprat initially said the man was upset that the girls were wearing shorts and T-shirts.
He later said that did not appear to be the case and that the attacker’s motive was not known.
“At this time, we don’t have a firm answer,” Raphael Balland, prosecutor for the region, told reporters.
Mr Balland said the attacker, who was on holiday with his wife and children, had used a three-inch folding knife.
The youngest girl, who was the most gravely wounded, was out of danger following surgery at the hospital in Grenoble, Mr Duprat said.
Her mother and her two sisters were recovering at the hospital in Gap, a town closer to where the violence occurred.
Bastille Day attack
Laragne-Montéglin is 110 miles northwest of Nice, where a Tunisian man killed 84 people on July 14th by driving a truck through a holiday crowd on Bastille Day.
The July 14th carnage has deeply upset a country still reeling from the November 13th attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people, and the January 2015 attack that targeted the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in the French capital.
Hours after the Alps attack, gendarmes evacuated a hotel north of Avignon after a man armed with a knife barricaded himself in his room and refused to pay his bill.
An official close to the investigation said there were unconfirmed reports the man had been seen with a suspicious parcel with wires showing.
AP