TIRANA (Reuters) – Europe is seeing a rise of “Islamist terrorism” and all states are threatened, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday during a visit to Albania, after Islamist killings of a teacher in France and two Swedish football fans in Belgium.
Macron spoke a day after a 45-year-old attacker, who identified himself as a member of Islamic State and claimed responsibility in a video posted online, killed the two Swedes fans in Brussels.
In Paris, a French anti-terrorism prosecutor said on Tuesday A 20-year-old man who fatally stabbed the schoolteacher and wounded three others in the northern city of Arras on Oct. 13 had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.
“We saw it again yesterday in Brussels. All European states are vulnerable, and there is indeed a resurgence of Islamist terrorism,” Macron said after talks with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in Tirana.
“Here, we reiterate our solidarity with our Belgian friends,” Macron said.
He added that in the coming days or weeks he might visit Israel, at war with Islamist group Hamas since militants burst through Gaza’s border fence and killed 1,300 people, mainly civilians, in a rampage through nearby Israeli communities.
“My desire,” Macron said, “is to be able to travel there when we can obtain a concrete agreement either on non-escalation or on humanitarian issues and more broadly on everything.
“Israel’s security, the fight against all terrorist groups, as well as the peace process and the political solution, are all interconnected,” he said. “This is the agenda we need to rediscover.”
(Reporting by Florian Goga in Tirana, Fatos Bytyci in Pristina, Hedy Beloucif and Marine Strauss; writing by Ivana Sekularac; editing by Mark Heinrich)
