Four children hurt in knife attack

A man armed with a knife stabbed four preschool children and injured two adults by a lake in the French Alps yesterday in an attack that sent shock waves through the country.

A police spokesman said the attacker was a 31-year old Syrian asylum seeker who carried Swedish identity documents and a Swedish driving license. He entered France legally and was not known to security agencies.

Video of him taken by a bystander in Annecy, a town 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of the Swiss city of Geneva, shows him dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt and shorts while holding a small blade.

Witnesses described the knifeman running around a public park on the banks of Lake Annecy in a frenzy, apparently attacking people at random, before he was shot by police.

"He wanted to attack everyone. I moved away and he lunged at an old man and woman and stabbed the old man," former footballer Anthony Le Tallec, who was running in the park, told the Dauphine Libere newspaper.

The suspect did not appear to have a "terrorist motive", the local prosecutor said.

Line Bonnet-Mathis also said that of the four children injured in the assault, one was aged just 22 months, two were two-year-olds, and the eldest was three.