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An attacker with a knife has stabbed several young children and at least one adult, leaving some with life-threatening injuries, in a town in the French Alps.
French President Emmanuel Macron said "children and an adult are between life and death". He described the assault in the Alpine town of Annecy as an "attack of absolute cowardice".
"The nation is in shock," Macron said on Twitter.
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Police detained the attacker, said Interior Minster Gerald Darmanin. Police said the attacker was a man in his thirties.
Darmanin said the attack took place in a square in the lakeside town of Annecy, just over the border from Geneva in Switzerland and about 550km south-east of Paris.
In a short tweet, Darmanin said police had detained the attacker.
"Several people including children have been injured by an individual armed with a knife in a square in Annecy," he tweeted.
Witnesses said some of the children appeared very young. A man who spoke to broadcaster BFMTV said he saw first-aiders working on "little bodies, 3 or 4 years old, perhaps".
A local politician, Antoine Armand, described the attack as "abominable" and said the children were attacked on a playground.
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"We still know very little but all my support for the victims, relatives, law enforcement and rescue," Armand said in a translation of a tweet.
Speaking to BFMTV from the National Assembly building in Paris, he said the victims included "very young" children and that they were "savagely attacked".
The attack took place close to a primary school, he said.
National police and an Interior Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised to speak about the developing situation both said that four children were among the wounded.
Police said two of the children suffered life-threatening injuries and that the other two were lightly injured.
Police said one adult also suffered life-threatening wounds.
Both police and the Interior Ministry official cautioned that cautioned that the number of wounded could evolve because the full details weren't yet clear.
In Paris, politicians interrupted a debate to hold a moment of silence for the victims.
The assembly president, Yaël Braun-Pivet, said: "There are some very young children who are in critical condition and I invite you to respect a minute of silence for them, for their families, and so that, we hope, the consequences of this very grave attack do not lead to the nation grieving."
