France has raised its terror alert to the highest level after a rampaging teenager killed one teacher and wounded another during a “barbaric” knife attack at a school.
The horrifying stabbing at Lycee Gambetta High School, in the northern French city of Arras, was allegedly perpetrated by a former student, a Russian-born Chechen, a police source said.
All, including the teacher who died, were hit when trying to stop the attacker.
President Emmanuel Macron condemned the attack as “barbaric Islamic terrorism” while urging the French to remain united and refrain from bringing the Israel-Hamas conflict home.
“Terrorism strikes once again in a school, and in a context that we all know,” he said.
Police could not confirm local media reports that the teen shouted “Allahu Akbar”.
The teen terror suspect was on a watchlist of people known as potential security risks in connection to radical Islamism, a police source said.
BFM-TV said the person killed was a French language teacher, while a sports teacher was stabbed and injured. Pupils were confined to their classrooms, it said.
‘He’s got a knife’
“We’re all in a state of shock,” philosophy teacher Martin Doussau said, after he was chased down by the attacker but managed to escape unharmed after locking himself in a room.
Doussau said he witnessed the assailant going after the school’s cook in the yard during a break between two classes before the attacker approached his way.
“It’s when I left that I discovered that one of our colleagues had been stabbed in the carotid artery and died in front of the school,” he told Reuters.
A video obtained by Reuters showed three people — one of them with a chair — trying to stop the attacker in the school’s parking lot and getting struck by him.
“He’s got a knife, he’s got a knife,” one of those watching the scene said.
Police forensic investigators work at the high school in Arras, north-east France. Photo: Getty
A security alert was triggered later at another school in Arras, a school worker told Reuters.
A third man was arrested in that incident when he tried to enter the school with a suspicious backpack, French media reported.
Education Minister Gabriel Attal said security would be reinforced in schools throughout France.
France has been targeted by a series of Islamist attacks across the years, the worst being a simultaneous assault by gunmen and suicide bombers on entertainment venues and cafes in Paris in November 2015.
In 2020, a teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a Chechen teenager who wanted to avenge his use of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammad during a class on freedom of expression.
