A teenage pupil at a French highschool within the western metropolis of Nantes stabbed 4 different college students throughout a lunch break on Thursday, killing one in every of them and injuring the others earlier than he was overpowered and arrested, the authorities stated.
The police didn’t instantly establish the assailant, however Le Parisien newspaper stated a 15-year-old male pupil was liable for the assault. BFM TV reported that the coed killed was feminine. There was no obvious indication of any terrorist motive for the assault, however the antiterrorism prosecutor’s workplace confirmed that it was evaluating the case.
Élisabeth Borne, the schooling minister, and Bruno Retailleau, the inside minister, each rushed to the scene. Knife assaults in colleges have grow to be a difficulty of specific sensitivity in France after a collection of episodes, together with the deadly stabbing of a instructor by a pupil at a personal college within the southwestern metropolis of St.-Jean-de-Luz in February 2023, and a number of other extra minor current assaults.
French information media reported that the assailant in Thursday’s stabbing despatched a manifesto earlier within the day to the college denouncing the state of the world, significantly “systemic violence” and “social alienation.” The police didn’t instantly touch upon the manifesto.
The obvious manifesto stated “the system infiltrates minds, our bodies, relationships, feelings, needs and language,” forming an “invisible structure of psychological submission.”
The assault occurred on the personal Notre-Dame-de-Toutes-Aides Excessive Faculty, which was shortly surrounded by police and navy forces. The native Ouest-France newspaper stated the assailant had a helmet and a balaclava and was wearing black. Two knives, together with a looking knife, have been reportedly discovered along with his belongings.
Involved about rising violence in colleges, Ms. Borne and Mr. Retailleau wrote final month to regional prefects and heads of faculties urging “random checks within the areas round instructional institutions.” It’s unclear whether or not any elevated safety operations are already underway throughout France.
The obvious manifesto stated that know-how was geared toward “rendering human beings docile, predictable and programmable.”
The far-right Nationwide Rally social gathering of Marine Le Pen, which has made safety a core a part of its political program, reacted shortly.
“It’s greater than time to take the mandatory measures to eradicate the banalization of the acute violence which is ravaging the guts of our colleges,” Ms. Le Pen, who has been barred from operating for public workplace after her current conviction on embezzlement costs, wrote on X.
The only largest contributor to the French trauma over violence in colleges was the stabbing and decapitation of Samuel Paty, a French historical past instructor, by an Islamist terrorist in October 2020, close to his college within the Paris area.
The terrorist, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot and killed by the police shortly after the assault. He had been angered by the instructor’s show of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as an example free speech in a civics class.
Faculties maintain a spot of close to sacred significance within the construction of the French Republic as a result of they’re seen because the locations the place the tradition of a secular, nondiscriminatory and colorblind society is taught, nonetheless far in need of that ideally suited France could generally fall.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.