PARIS — An explosion wounded at least two people in an attack on a non-Muslim cemetery in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday during a ceremony organized by the French Consulate for Remembrance Day, French officials said.
Nathalie Goulet, a French senator and a member of a parliamentary friendship group between France and Gulf countries, said an explosive device had apparently been thrown at the cemetery. She said the two wounded people had minor injuries.
The consul general of France in Jeddah, French expatriates and officials from countries including Britain and Germany were among those who attended the ceremony. But Ms. Goulet said she could not give details about the identities of those wounded.
The attack followed several others in recent weeks that targeted France amid tensions over the republication in September of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
President Emmanuel Macron of France has defended the cartoons as protected free speech. But that stoked anger in the Muslim world, drawing threats and calls from some countries for a boycott of French products.
Christophe-André Frassa, a senator representing French citizens living abroad, wrote on Twitter that “compatriots” in Jeddah were attacked during the ceremony, which was commemorating the armistice of World War I.
In late October, a Saudi citizen wounded a guard in a knife attack at the French Consulate in Jeddah; on the same day, a young Tunisian extremist killed three churchgoers in a basilica in Nice, France.
