Anxiety and heightened alert gripped France on Friday shortly after a man fatally stabbed a teacher and two others in an attack on a school in the town of Arras in northern France.
France is known to have suffered a number of attacks by Islamic extremists in recent years. One of the most tragic and violent was in November 2015 in Paris, when militants and terrorists simultaneously attacked entertainment cafes.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Friday the Arras attack bore a link to events in the Middle East, where Israel is conducting military reprisals in Gaza to root out Hamas fighters after their deadly attack on Israel last Saturday.
Visiting the site of the attack, Macron honoured the memory of slain teacher Dominique Bernard. “Once again a school was hit by the barbarity of Islamic terrorism,” he said.
Details of the investigation are already known: the suspect’s name is Mohamed M. and he was a former student of Lycee Gambetta high school. French media reported that he was a Russian-born Ingush, while the prosecutor’s office described him as a Russian-born Chechen.
The man was known to be under surveillance by intelligence services and his phone was tapped over the past few days as authorities noticed suspicious behaviour but found no signs of a planned attack, according to the words of Gerald Darmanin.
Several other schools in France have had similar incidents, but they ended either with the declaration of an alarm (another school in Arras) or the prevention of a terrorist attack (in Paris).
