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A instructor was killed and two folks severely injured in a stabbing at a French highschool on Friday morning — an incident that’s being investigated as a possible terrorist assault.
French Inside Minister Gérald Darmanin stated the stabbing occurred in Arras, a metropolis in northern France. The perpetrator was arrested, he stated. French President Emmanuel Macron later joined Darmanin on the college.
Witnesses stated the attacker shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is best” in Arabic. Radio station Europe 1 stated the suspect was a person of Chechen origin and had been recognized to the safety companies for his involvement with radical Islam.
The suspect’s brother was detained close to one other college, in keeping with Le Parisien.
The assault instantly recalled the case of Samuel Paty, a historical past and civics instructor who was decapitated in a Paris suburb almost three years in the past by a Chechen refugee, sparking a nationwide debate concerning the affect of radical Islam.
“Three years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, horror as soon as once more strikes the tutorial neighborhood,” tweeted Laurent Brosse, the mayor of the city the place that earlier assault passed off. “The terrorist act in #Arras brings again painful recollections to us.”
Martin Doussau, a philosophy instructor on the Gambetta highschool in Arras, stated the attacker on Friday requested him particularly if he was a historical past instructor. That’s when “I understood it was a political act,” he informed BFM tv.
Fabien Dufay, a bodily schooling instructor on the college, informed BFM tv that he acknowledged the attacker as a former pupil on the college, describing him “calm” and an “common pupil.”
The French Council of Muslim Religion condemned the “murderous and abject assault,” including that the Allahu Akbar expression “erected by some as a slogan of cowardice and terrorist barbarity, has been dangerously overused, whereas within the Muslim religious custom it’s the image of the humility of Man earlier than God.”
After a spate of high-profile terrorist assaults that put France on excessive alert and led to expanded powers for police, France has seen comparatively few incidents lately. Earlier this yr, a Syrian nationwide stabbed 4 toddlers and two adults at a playground in southeastern France, an assault that Macron described as an act of “absolute cowardi