One dead and several police officers wounded in knife attack in France | France

A 69-year-old passerby who intervened when a suspected terrorist attacked police officers with a knife shouting “Allahu Akbar” has died in eastern France.

Two police officers were also seriously injured in the suspected Islamist terrorist act, which took place in the city of Mulhouse during a demonstration in support of the Congo on Saturday afternoon. Three other police officers were lightly wounded.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said the knife attack was “without any doubt an act of Islamist terrorism”. The suspected attacker, an Algerian male who has been arrested, is on a terror prevention watchlist, according to the anti-terrorism prosecution office (PNAT).

He has been under judicial supervision and house arrest, and was under an expulsion order from France, according to union sources.

Shortly before 4pm, he attacked local police officers shouting “God is greatest” in Arabic, PNAT said in a statement. Witnesses confirmed to Agence France-Presse that the suspect had several times shouted the phrase.

One of the seriously wounded police officers sustained an injury to the carotid artery, and the other to the thorax.

The passerby, who is understood to have been a Portuguese national, was killed trying to intervene, the PNAT said.

“Horror has seized our city,” Mulhouse mayor Michèle Lutz said on Facebook. The incident was being investigated as a terror attack, she said, but “this must obviously still be confirmed by the judiciary”.

The French interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, is expected to travel to the scene of the attack on Saturday evening. Police have established a security perimeter after the attack, as forensic scientists searched for evidence. Military units have been sent to the scene as backup.

The government was determined to continue doing “everything to eradicate terrorism on our soil”, Macron said. The “solidarity of the nation” was with the attack victim and his family, he added.

France’s terror prevention list compiles data from various authorities on people to prevent terrorist radicalisation. It was launched in 2015 after deadly attacks on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket.