Arras: Attacker stabs teacher in French school

A young man who was targeted by the authorities as a radical Islamist stabbed a teacher and injured three other people at a high school in Arras, northern France. The 20-year-old former student was incapacitated by police with a Taser and arrested, France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on Friday. “According to our information, there is undoubtedly a connection between the events in the Middle East and the crime,” said the minister. The anti-terrorism public prosecutor’s office took over the investigation into murder and attempted murder with a terrorist background.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the school had been hit “by the barbarity of Islamist terrorism” on site in Arras. The teacher who was killed stood in the attacker’s way, as did his injured colleague and another injured school employee. “They have undoubtedly saved many lives, I would like to pay tribute to them.”

Highest terror alert level imposed

After the attack, France imposed the highest terror alert level. In the current situation, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced that she had decided to impose the highest warning level of “emergency assassination attempt”. The warning level can be set up for the crisis management period immediately after an attack or when an identified and unlocated terrorist group becomes active.

Anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said the 20-year-old perpetrator shouted “God is great” in Arabic during his attack. No students were harmed in the attack; the classes barricaded themselves in their classrooms and stayed there for a long time until the all-clear was given. In addition to the attacker, other people were arrested, Ricard said. According to media reports, these include the perpetrator’s older brother, who was also radicalized, a sister, his mother and an uncle.

“It was a race against time”

The attacker comes from Chechnya. As Interior Minister Darmanin said in the evening news on TF1, the Russian-born perpetrator had recently been listed in a file for radicalized people and had been wiretapped for several days. He was last intensively checked by the police on Thursday – the day before the attack – but no specific threat was identified or a weapon was found. “It was a race against time,” said the minister. Under no circumstances can it be said that the security authorities have failed.

As the newspaper “Le Parisien” reported with reference to the authorities, the attacker’s older brother was arrested in 2019 for preparing an attack and sentenced to prison as a member of a terrorist organization. The family of seven who came to France in 2008 should actually have been deported in 2014 because they were not entitled to asylum. Local associations prevented this at the last minute, as the newspaper reported. As Darmanin said, under current law the attacker could not have been deported despite his radicalization because he came to France when he was less than 15 years old.

The attack shocks France all the more because it comes almost three years to the day after the fatal attack on history teacher Samuel Paty, which Macron also pointed out. The 47-year-old was killed by an attacker in a Paris suburb on October 16, 2020 and then beheaded. The crime was classified as an Islamist-motivated act of terrorism and sparked international outrage. Security forces shot the perpetrator.