A one-minute silence was held in schools around France on Monday in homage to the 57-year-old schoolteacher who died in a knife attack at a school in the north-easttern town of Arras on Friday, when three other people were left in a serious condition.
The Louvre museum in Paris on Saturday evacuated visitors, who numbered around 15,000, and closed down after receiving unspecified threats which officials said posed 'a risk to the museum and its visitors', while the Château de Versailles west of the capital was similarly evacuated after a bomb threat.
France deployed around 7,000 troops on Saturday to take part in increased security patrols as the country was placed on its highest level of alert over the threat of terrorism, for the first time in three years, following the apparent terrorist murder of a schoolteacher on Friday.
A 20-year-old man described by officials as being of Chechen origin is in police custody, along with his brother, 16, following a stabbing attack on Friday at a secondary school in Arras, north-east France, in which a teacher was murdered and two other school staff seriously wounded, while reports say police have also arrested a man armed with a knife close to a school in the Paris suburbs.
Exiled Russian artist Petr Pavlensky, who admitted posting a sexually explicit video of former French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux which ruined the latter's 2020 bid to become mayor of Paris, and which also ended his political career, has been handed a six-month jail sentence by a Paris court.
French president Emmanuel Macron, speaking during a visit to Germany, said the threat by Palestinian paramilitary group Hamas to murder some of the hostages it captured during its incursion into Israel was 'odious and unacceptable' blackmail.
French interior minister Gérald Darmanin said the new detention centres for people awaiting deportation would open in the next four years in 11 cities, bringing their total to 3,000.
Investigation is over how and why businessman Ziad Takieddine retracted earlier statements about having delivered Libyan funds in France to former president and his entourage.
