http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/world/europe/french-authorites-appeal-for-calm-after-string-of-attacks.html 2014-12-23 15:05:07 French Authorities Appeal for Calm After String of Attacks Security officials drew clear distinctions between the three episodes, one of which involved a knife-wielding assailant who was shot and killed by the police. === PARIS — After a string of attacks across French security officials say they have not established any direct links between the attacks in the central town of Joué-lès-Tours on Saturday, in Dijon on Sunday, and in Nantes on Monday. In Dijon and Nantes, more than 20 people were wounded after men drove vans into crowds of people, with one of the drivers shouting an Islamic rallying call. The authorities depicted both drivers as mentally unstable. In Joué-lès-Tours, a 20-year-old man entered a police station while wielding a knife and attacked three officers before another shot and killed him. The episodes raised fears that militants acting alone may have decided to stage attacks on French citizens in response to their government’s support for the American-led air campaign against jihadists in Syria and Iraq. The attacks followed bloody episodes ascribed to so-called lone wolf assailants Security concerns in France and elsewhere have been heightened by the radicalization of thousands of Europeans who have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, which seeks the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq. In statements on Monday, Mr. Valls declared: “Never have we faced such danger in matters of terrorism. We have over 1,000 individuals who are involved in jihad and Syria and Iraq.” He added: “The string of tragedies that we have been faced with is worrying for all of us.” But, speaking on Europe 1 radio on Tuesday, he said: “The best answer is to continue to live normally, with the necessary vigilance of course.” French officials have drawn clear distinctions between the three attacks. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, told reporters in Nantes on Monday that the attack in that city, where a man drove a white van into a crowd of pedestrians at a Christmas market, was “in all likelihood the act of an unstable person.” In Dijon, the city’s prosecutor, Marie-Christine Tarrare, said at a news conference on Monday that the driver who rammed into pedestrians the previous day was a 40-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who had “serious and long-established psychiatric issues” and who had been treated for such problems on 157 occasions. “His motivations are quite vague and hardly coherent,” Ms. Tarrare said of the driver, who has been arrested. In Joué-lès-Tours, a suburb of Tours, in central France, prosecutors identified the knife-wielding assailant as Bertrand Nzohabonayo. He was an immigrant from Burundi and the elder brother of Brice Nzohabonayo, 19, who was being monitored by the French security services because of his radical Islamist views. “Brice was being followed since August 2013, when their mother reported that she was worried about her son’s radicalization and the influence he might be having on Bertrand,” the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said at a news conference on Monday. Bertrand Nzohabonayo had taken the name Bilal on a Facebook page and had posted an image of the black flag of the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL, the prosecutor said. Their sister, who was detained Saturday and then released by the French police, said the family was originally Catholic. She said that Bertrand converted to Islam when he was 16 or 17 and quickly became radicalized. Brice Nzohabonayo was arrested in Burundi on Saturday, news reports said. The National Front party, which has demanded sharp curbs on immigration, seized on the three attacks to further castigate the authorities, accusing them of trying to minimize the threat posed by Islamic extremists in France. “The Islamic State, in its recurring Internet appeals, is calling to fight these ‘dirty French,’ as they put it, most notably by stabbing them, which was done in Joué-lès-Tours, and by running them over with cars, which, curiously, was done in Dijon and Nantes,” Florian Philippot, a vice president of the National Front, told RTL radio on Tuesday. The authorities have responded to the Islamist threat “with knees like jelly,” he said..