Around 11 a.m., a knife attack took place at Gambetta secondary school in the French city of Arras in the north of the country. A teacher was killed in the attack and two others were seriously injured, one of whom is in critical condition. The injured include a security guard and a teacher from the school.
Images circulating on social media showed a man brandishing a knife in a parking lot. Several bystanders tried to get the situation under control.
According to police, the slain teacher had a stab wound in the throat and chest. The victim was a French teacher at the school, Snes-FSU general secretary Sophie Vénétitay said. According to another police source, there were no casualties among the students.
Martin Dousseau, philosophy teacher, witnessed the attack and describes what he experienced: “He attacked a staff member from the canteen. I wanted to go down and intervene. He turned to me, chased me and asked if I was a history teacher. I think he was looking for a history teacher. We barricaded ourselves and afterwards the police came.”
20-year-old Chechen
According to the police, the suspect is a Chechen who was being monitored by the security services and was checked yesterday. The 20-year-old man was a former student of the school, has Russian nationality and has been in France since 2008, according to police. He had a ‘chip S’, which means that the French security services were monitoring him for radicalization.
According to French news channel BFMTV, the suspect shouted “Allahu akbar” during the attack. French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited the school in question this afternoon, said during his visit that the attack was the result of “barbaric Islamist terrorism”. According to Macron, the slain teacher tried to protect others and “without a doubt saved many lives.” The president also said police thwarted an attack elsewhere in France on Friday, but gave no further details.
‘Strengthen safety in schools’
Education Minister Gabriel Attal and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin also arrived on the scene. Attal has asked education authorities to “immediately take all necessary measures to strengthen security in all schools in France.”
The French National Public Prosecutor’s Office for Counter-Terrorism has launched an investigation into the circumstances of the knife attack. The perpetrator’s brother is also said to have been arrested, various French media report.
Samuel Patty
The attack comes almost three years after the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty, who showed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of expression. He was beheaded by a radicalized Chechen on October 16, 2020 in Paris, near the school where he taught. The perpetrator was shot dead by the police after the murder.
