A teacher has been killed and two other people critically injured in a stabbing at a school in Arras, northern France, reports The Guardian.
Europe 1 reported that the suspected attacker, who has been arrested, was on a watchlist of people known to be a security risk in connection with radical Islamism. Local media reported that he was a former pupil at the Gambetta-Carnot school. A police source told Agence France-Presse he was from Russia’s mainly Muslim southern Caucasus region of Chechnya.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecution office said it would start an investigation, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, arrived at the scene mid-afternoon.
The attack happened at about 11am. BFMTV reported that the person killed was a French literature teacher. A second teacher, reported to be a sports teacher, and a school security guard were in hospital with critical injuries, according to the local prefect.
A video on social media filmed by students showed a man in a grey jacket carrying a knife and attacking people in the school courtyard. One of the victims tried to keep him at a distance with a chair.
The Arras attack came almost exactly three years after Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was killed in an attack by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee outside his school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on 16 October 2020.
Martin Doussau, a philosophy teacher at the school in Arras, said he had come face-to-face with the suspect, who had just attacked the third victim. He said the man had asked him “quite aggressively” several times if he was a history teacher. It was at that moment, he said, he realised the attack was linked to Paty’s murder.