A French teaching assistant died on Tuesday after being stabbed several times during a bag search at a middle school in France.
The police arrested a 14-year-old student at the school in Nogent, a small town in northeastern France, according to the local authorities. Students, many of whom were in a state of distress after having witnessed the bloody scene, were placed under lockdown and then released to their parents throughout the day.
The attack reignited fears in France, where schoolteachers have been a target of increasing violence in recent years. The police have not yet disclosed a motive for the stabbing.
The French education minister, Élisabeth Borne, who rushed to the scene, told reporters that the student had been suspended twice early in the school year for disturbing class but had presented no difficulties since then. He had what seemed like a stable home and had been an anti-bullying ambassador at the school, she said. The student, who has not been named, had no criminal record, according to the local state prosecutor.
“His professors are totally shocked by what happened,” Ms. Borne told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.
Students who had been in line for the bag search, which was overseen by local police officers, were in a state of profound shock, she said, and a psychological support team had been put in place immediately.
The 31-year-old teaching assistant, whom the police have not identified, had until recently been a hairdresser but had decided to make a career change, two of the assistant’s relatives and a former client told French news media on Tuesday.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media that the assistant was “the victim of an insane surge in violence.”
“The Nation is in mourning and the government is mobilized to fight against crime,” he added.
Teachers have been the target of many deadly violent attacks in France in recent years. The government has grown increasingly concerned about knife attacks by young people at schools. Ms. Borne announced in February that she was setting up random bag searches at schools, and said on Tuesday that such searches had uncovered “close to” 300 knives in recent weeks.
Two months later, in April, a student at a high school in Nantes stabbed four of his fellow students during a lunch break, before being overpowered and arrested.
Some attackers have had extremist motives. The country is still traumatized by the gruesome killing of a history teacher, Samuel Paty, in 2020, who was decapitated near a school after he had displayed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class to illustrate free speech. A court in Paris has convicted eight people for their roles in the events that led to the killing.
In 2023, a French literature teacher, Dominique Bernard, was stabbed to death outside his school in Arras by a former student. Shortly before the attack, the student had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in an audio recording on a cellphone that he had bought that morning, the country’s top antiterrorism prosecutor said.
Schools hold a place of near sacred importance in the structure of the French Republic because they are seen as the sites where the culture of a secular, nondiscriminatory and colorblind society is taught, however far short of that ideal France may sometimes fall.
Tuesday’s police search of bags was the second to date at the Nogent middle school. Before this morning, no weapons had been uncovered there, the police said.
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
Ségolène Le Stradic is a reporter and researcher covering France.
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