On Friday, a teacher was stabbed to death at the Gambetta public institute in the commune of Arras (population 40,000) in northern France. Another teacher and a maintenance worker were injured. The case is being investigated as a terrorist attack.
According to the broadcaster BFMTV, the arrested attacker uttered the phrase “Allahu akbar” at the time of the events. The same media stated that it was a man in his 20s of Chechen origin who was charged by the authorities with Islamist radicalization. Some sources indicate that he was a former high school student.
The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, will travel to Arras in the early afternoon, the Elysee Palace reported. In a speech on Thursday following the massacre of Israelis by the Palestinian group Hamas over the weekend, Macron called for the unity of the nation.
“Let us remember all the serious crises we have gone through together, let us remember how we responded as a bloc every time against terrorism,” Macron said. “It is this shield of unity that will protect us from all floods, all deviations and all hatred.”
French authorities have mobilized in recent days amid concerns that the war in the Middle East could raise 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.
A hundred anti-Semitic acts
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The government has recorded a hundred anti-Semitic incidents since the weekend, none particularly serious, but enough to warrant increased caution and surveillance at educational centers and Jewish places of worship. The anti-Semitic attacks on a school in Toulouse in 2012 or against a Jewish supermarket in January 2015 are remembered.
The anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into murder, attempted murder and association of criminals in connection with a terrorist act. Police also arrested the attacker’s brother.
Pictures broadcast on television show the perpetrator attacking people in the schoolyard who tried to stop him, one of them with a chair. The attacker is wearing a ponytail, a gray jacket, dark pants and white sneakers.
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 a professor in Arras comes three days before the third anniversary of the beheading of Professor Samuel Paty by an Islamist. The attacker was also of Chechen origin.
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