Investigators said the killer appeared to have psychological problems and had smoked large quantities of cannabis before the knife attack.

He was found in public records with two identities and three different dates of birth, making him either 33, 31 or 27 years’ old, prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet told a press conference in Lyon on Sunday.

During “confused” interviews with police, he said he was a Muslim “who had heard voices saying God had been insulted and instructing him to kill”, Jacquet said, adding that the case was being treated as a criminal, rather than terrorist, incident.

Two of the eight injured victims remained in hospital on Sunday, but none was in intensive care, Jacquet said.

Jacquet paid tribute to three bus drivers and other members of the public who had succeeded in cornering the man and persuading him to drop his knife and a meat skewer before the police arrived on the scene.

“I want to pay tribute to the actions of witnesses. Their courageous and controlled intervention was decisive in ending these criminal acts,” he added.

Prosecutor Jacquet said the knifeman had been first registered in France in 2009 as a minor, but he then travelled to Germany, Norway, Britain and Italy before returning to France in 2016 where he was granted temporary residency rights.

His room in an asylum seekers’ centre near to scene of the stabbings was raided by police on Sunday night.

Villeurbanne Mayor Jean-Paul Bret told reporters the detained man was the primary suspect and the only one suspected in the actual stabbing.

It was unclear if the slain man knew the attacker, local police said.

The attack happened about 4.30pm at a bus stop near the local station in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon.

“There was a man at the 57 (bus stop) who started striking out with a knife in all directions,” a witness said.

“He managed to hit, to open the belly of one person. He stabbed a guy in the head, he cut the ear of a lady and the lady was dying at the bus stop and no one came to help,” she added, sobbing.

French waiter shot dead for making sandwich too slowly, witnesses say

She eventually managed to get the woman on a bus, which closed its doors and drove away from the scene. “There was blood everywhere,” the woman said.

Sofiane, a 17-year-old from the area, said the dead man was one of the first to try to reason with the knifeman.

The killer “stabbed him and then when he fell on the ground, he continued”, Sofiane said.

Of the eight people wounded in the attack, three were in a critical condition, said the prosecutor’s office.

Paramedics treated another 20 people at the scene for shock.

The knife attack on Sunday sparked a row about immigration as the new details about the suspect emerged.

Far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen led criticism of what she termed “the laxness of migration policy” in France which she said was “a serious threat to the safety of French people”.

The mayor of Villeurbanne, Jean-Paul Bret from the Socialist party, accused Le Pen and others on the right and far-right of “exploiting things politically”.

“It’s the classic reaction from the far-right which tries to turn a dramatic event to its advantage,” he told the RTL radio station.

Why are so many police officers in France taking their own lives?

France remains on high alert after several deadly extremist attacks in 2015 and 2016.

Last May, a parcel bomb in front of a baker’s shop in central Lyon slightly injured 14 people.

The perpetrator, a young radicalised Algerian, who was arrested three days later, pledged allegiance to Islamic State, according to his confession.

Lyon, France’s third-largest city, had until then remained untouched by the wave of jihadist attacks that have killed 251 people in France since 2015.