Nice stabbing at Notre-Dame de Nice

On the morning of 29 October 2020, at around 8:30 a.m., a man armed with a knife attacked worshippers inside the Notre-Dame basilica, a Roman Catholic church on Avenue Jean Médecin in central Nice. Three people were killed. The victims were a 60-year-old woman who had been praying inside and whose throat was cut, the basilica's 55-year-old sexton, who died of a throat wound, and a 44-year-old Brazilian-born Frenchwoman who fled the church gravely wounded and collapsed and died at a nearby cafe. Several others were injured.

The assailant, 21-year-old Tunisian national Brahim Aouissaoui, repeatedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. He had reached the Italian island of Lampedusa by migrant boat weeks earlier before travelling on to France. Police shot and wounded him at the scene and took him into custody; officers recovered a copy of the Quran, knives and mobile phones. French President Emmanuel Macron and Nice mayor Christian Estrosi described it as an Islamist terrorist attack, and the national anti-terrorism prosecutor (PNAT) opened a terrorism investigation. In February 2025, a Paris special assize court convicted Aouissaoui and sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

This was an act of jihadist terrorism, not foreign-state hybrid activity. French anti-terrorism authorities investigated and prosecuted it as Islamist-motivated terrorism, and a court convicted the lone assailant of terrorist murder. The attack targeted a church and came amid heightened tensions in France following the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty and renewed disputes over depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. There is no credible evidence linking it to any state sponsor or sabotage campaign; it reflects the threat from radicalised individuals acting in the name of violent Islamist ideology.