A teenage scholar at a French highschool within the western metropolis of Nantes stabbed 4 different college students throughout a lunch break on Thursday, killing one among 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 scholar was answerable for the assault. BFM TV reported that the scholar 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 training minister, and Bruno Retailleau, the inside minister, each rushed to the scene. Knife assaults in faculties have grow to be a difficulty of specific sensitivity in France after a sequence of episodes, including the fatal stabbing of a teacher by a student at a non-public faculty within the southwestern metropolis of St.-Jean-de-Luz in February 2023, and several other extra minor latest assaults.
French news 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, wishes and language,” forming an “invisible structure of psychological submission.”
The assault occurred on the non-public Notre-Dame-de-Toutes-Aides Excessive College, 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 together with his belongings.
Involved about rising violence in faculties, 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 expertise was aimed toward “rendering human beings docile, predictable and programmable.”
The far-right Nationwide Rally get together 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 faculties,” Ms. Le Pen, who has been barred from running for public office after her latest conviction on embezzlement costs, wrote on X.
The one largest contributor to the French trauma over violence in faculties was the stabbing and decapitation of Samuel Paty, a French historical past trainer, by an Islamist terrorist in October 2020, close to his faculty 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 trainer’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 very best France could generally fall.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
