1 dead, 4 wounded in Italy supermarket stabbing spree
Police investigate the scene of an attack on a supermarket in Italy that left three men dead and four wounded.
By Tom Hall
4 Min Read
ROME (Reuters) – Two men were killed and four wounded when assailants armed with knives and a machete stabbed a policeman to death and his partner in a supermarket in central Italy on Thursday afternoon, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said.
One other police officer was seriously wounded and three civilians were slightly injured, the national police said. Maroni said that the wounded were two employees at a small grocery store who were not police and the officers had been responding to a report of a suspicious person.
The first officer, who had just arrived at the supermarket, attacked, shouting “allahu Akbar” (God is great) and “Allahu Akbar” three times as he and his partner were making their way to the store, Maroni said.
“They had a struggle and eventually the man was killed,” he told the parliament television channel RAI.
The third officer was stabbed in the throat and stabbed a couple of times in the chest when he tried to intervene, Maroni said.
The attackers then fled on foot and Maroni said one of the men had been arrested.
“On Friday we will go to the scene of the crime to see if we can identify the suspects,” he said.
Police surrounded the supermarket in the village of Campidoglio, near Rome, around 3 p.m. (1630 GMT Thursday) after a man called emergency services to report a suspect who stabbed two other people.
A wounded policeman died at the scene while his partner was hospitalized as a precaution, Maroni said.
The attack was the third of its kind in Italy this month, following two incidents in the southern region of Puglia.
In the southern region of Puglia, a man drove his car into crowds celebrating a military coup, killing an employee of a construction company and wounding three other people, before he was shot and killed by police.
On April 10, two men opened fire at a crowded bar in the southern city of Taranto, killing two military police officers and injuring nine people, and on April 18, two men in a car attacked and killed one soldier outside a police station in the same city.
In addition to the stabbing at the supermarket, other attacks on police and
