A French teacher was stabbed to death this Friday at the Gambetta-Carnot public institute in Arras, a municipality of 40,000 inhabitants in the old mining and industrial lands of northern France. Another teacher and a maintenance worker have been injured. The case is being investigated as a terrorist attack. The attacker, who has been identified as Mohammed M. and is detained, uttered the phrase “Allahu akbar” (God is great) at the time of the events, according to the BFMTV network. The same media has indicated that it was a 20-year-old man, of Chechen origin and booked by the authorities for Islamist radicalization. Some sources indicate that the detainee was a former high school student. The deceased has been identified as Dominique Bernard.
“Almost exactly three years after the murder of[l profesor de Historial] Samuel Paty, the barbarity of Islamist terrorism strikes again in a school,” declared the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, in Arras. “Once again a school is hit by terrorism, and in a context that we all know,” he added, referring to the war in the Middle East. Macron explained that on Friday another attempted attack against a school in the province of Yvelines, west of Paris, was dismantled. He added: “We respond as a unit and we remain standing.”
The Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation for murder, attempted murder and association of criminals in relation to a terrorist act. Law enforcement has also detained a younger brother of the attacker and two other people. Another brother was arrested in 2019 for preparing a terrorist attack with a group of sympathizers of the Islamic State (ISIS), according to Le Monde. The attacker was born in Russia in 2003 and moved to France in 2008. He was under surveillance by the internal intelligence services. The same Thursday, one day before the attack, he was subjected to a police check. In images broadcast on television, you can see the school yard and the perpetrator of the crime attacking people who were trying to stop him, one of them with a chair. The attacker was wearing a ponytail, a gray jacket, dark pants and white sneakers.
The events occurred around 11:00. Bartolomé, an 11-year-old student, says 300 meters from the school in Arras, still shocked by what he had just experienced, that he was playing soccer in the yard when everyone started running. At first, he didn’t understand what was happening, he thought it was a fight. Then, he saw the sports teacher collapse due to his stab wounds, and ran to take refuge in a classroom. He spent more than two and a half hours locked inside with his companions.
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“In my class there were people who said: ‘We are going to die, there is a terrorist at school,’ explains the student. “From what I understand he was with knives, what he did is horrible, but I don’t think they could have gone in and killed us all.” And he adds: “Apparently, he wanted a History teacher, my mother is a History teacher, imagining that he could have died is horrible.” “We would never have thought that this could happen in Arras, it is a small city, these things happen in Paris, in Marseille,” says Laetitia, mother of a student at the institute.
Martin Dousseau, a philosophy teacher at Gambetta-Carnot, was passing through the courtyard when the attacker began to threaten anyone who approached him with two knives and ask for a history teacher to stab. According to Dousseau, this is because, after Paty’s murder at the hands of an Islamist terrorist three years ago, the History teacher has become a symbol. “I told him: ‘You can’t do this!’ He told me: ‘You’re a history teacher! You’re a History teacher!’ He ran towards me and I locked myself in the building and we padlocked the glass door. He was trying to open it,” he says.
A few minutes before the attack, Professor Dousseau was explaining to his 16 and 17 year old students: “You say that religion does not interest you, but it could affect you: because there is life and death, because there may be attacks that you witness or in your country. He was telling her just before, it’s funny.”
A hundred anti-Semitic acts
French authorities have mobilized in recent days amid fears that the war in the Middle East will cause tensions in France. This is the third country in the world with the largest Jewish population (after Israel and the United States) and one of the Western countries with the largest Muslim population.
The Government has recorded a hundred anti-Semitic acts since the weekend, none of them extremely serious, but enough to reinforce caution and surveillance in educational centers and Jewish places of worship. The anti-Semitic attacks at a school in Toulouse in 2012 or against a Jewish supermarket in January 2015 live on in memory.
The Gambetta-Carnot high school is public and secular. It is not yet clear whether the aggression is directly related to the war in Israel and Gaza. The murder of the professor in Arras occurs three days before commemorating the third anniversary of the beheading of Professor Samuel Paty by an Islamist. The attacker was also of Chechen origin.
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