British man charged for attempted murder of woman in France

She was left critically injured

As LBC reported, the alleged attack was said to have taken place just after midnight on Sunday in the French city, and it was thwarted by by one of the woman's neighbours.

An allegation of rape against the man is currently being investigated by police, while the man has not been named.

How the events unfolded

According to the authorities, the man was arrested after Yuri Lebedev, a 33-year-old Russian immigrant, said he heard a woman shout “stop, stop” from a flat across the courtyard at his apartment building on Avenue Georges Clemenceau.

Image: Google Street view

As per a police official, officers found the attacker “being held down by a neighbour, who had heard the woman screaming inside an apartment block.”

“I went out on the balcony and saw a man on the floor who was stabbing someone in the head. I ran downstairs and across the yard. It was a man I’ve seen several times at the foot of the building. He threatened me in English, saying three or four times, ‘If you approach, I’ll kill you’”, Mr Lebedev told Nice Matin newspaper.

“I heard the woman’s voice. I circled round and managed to grab the hand holding the knife and managed to disarm him. I elbowed him in the face and threw him on the ground … I got the knife away from him”, Lebedev added.

“She was badly injured. She said she was dying, she was losing consciousness. She was stabbed for nothing,” Lebedev said, adding that she tried to staunch the bleeding.

“This is not something you see every day in Nice,” he said. The attacker was “very odd, unbalanced”.

According to witnesses, the suspect is also said to have roamed Nice knocking on doors, as he claimed he had been robbed in the week before the alleged attack.