REMEMBERING : OCTOBER 13, 2023: French teacher stabbed to death in knife attack at school

 

French teacher stabbed to death in knife attack at school

 

French authorities are treating the incident as a terrorist attack.

 

BY CLEA CAULCUTT

OCTOBER 13, 2023 1:24 PM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/one-dead-several-wounded-knife-attack-france-teacher-macron/

 

PARIS — A teacher has been killed and two people wounded in a knife attack Friday at a school in the northern French city of Arras, local media report.

 

The French interior minister confirmed a police operation was ongoing and that the attacker has been arrested.

 

According to several media reports, the attack took place inside the Gambetta high school at 11 a.m. on Friday. The attacker, who has been named in the French press as Mohammed Mogouchkov, is reportedly of Chechen origin and is said to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the attack.

 

French President Emmanuel Macron has arrived at the scene Friday afternoon, along with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and Education Minister Gabriel Attal. In the wake of the attack, the French education ministry reinforced security at schools across the country.

 

The anti-terrorist branch of the prosecutor’s office is in charge of the investigation into the attack. Mogouchkov was reportedly under police surveillance before the attack and on the police register of radicalized individuals.

 

According to the AFP, the wounded include a security guard who was stabbed several times and is fighting for his life, and a teacher who is in a less serious condition.

 

The attacker “turned toward a staff member of the school, the head cook I believe and injured him, and stabbed him several times,” said Martin Dousseau, a philosophy teacher who witnessed the attack. “I was then chased by him, and asked me ‘are you a history teacher?’ Luckily we were near a glass door of the school, and we locked ourselves inside,” he said in an interview with BFMTV.

 

Sophie Vénétitay, head the teacher union’s SNES-SUP said the teacher and the security agent “tried to protect the pupils” during the attack.

 

“They were doing what we all believe in, working for our children, all the time, teaching them of course, but also protecting them,” she said during an interview with France Inter.

 

The French National Assembly held a minute of silence in honor of the victim.

 

The attack comes three years after another attack at a school in the Paris suburbs where a teacher was beheaded by a Chechen extremist.

 

France has been on high alert since Hamas launched a shock attack on Israel, killing over 1,200 people and kidnapping dozens into Gaza. French police have been dispatched to protect Jewish schools and places of worships amid a spat of antisemitic acts.