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PARIS (AP) \u2014 A man armed with a knife killed a teacher at the high school in northern France he once attended and critically wounded another teacher and a security guard Friday, authorities said, an attack being investigated as potential terrorism amid soaring global tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas.<\/p>\n
French anti-terror prosecutors said they were leading the investigation into the attack at the Gambetta high school in the city of Arras, some 115 miles (185 kilometers) north of Paris. They said they were investigating charges including terror-related murder and attempted murder against the suspect, who was arrested.<\/p>\n
National police said the suspected assailant was a Russian national of Chechen origin. The French intelligence services said the suspect had been closely watched since the summer with tails and telephone surveillance and was stopped as recently as Thursday for a police check that found no wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
Sliman Hamzi, a police officer who was one of the first on the scene said the suspected attacker, a former student at the school, shouted \u201cAllahu akbar,\u201d or \u201cGod is great\u201d in Arabic.<\/p>\n
Hamzi said he was alerted by another officer who was passing in front of the high school and called in. He \u201cwas shouting \u2018someone is attacking with a knife,\u2019\u201d Hamzi said<\/p>\n
Hamzi said he rushed to the school and saw a male victim lying on the ground outside the school and the attacker being taken away.<\/p>\n
\u201cColleagues arrived quickly but unfortunately couldn\u2019t save the victim,\u201d Hamzi said.<\/p>\n
Police said two other men, a second teacher and a security guard, were in critical conidtion.<\/p>\n
School attacks are rare in France. President Emmanuel Macron was heading to the scene along with the interior and education ministers, and the government asked authorities to heighten vigilance at all schools across the country.<\/p>\n
Julie Duhamel, an official with the the Unsa teachers\u2019 union in the Pas-de-Calais region that includes Arras, told Franceinfo that teachers had noted the suspect\u2019s radicalization \u201ca few years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hundreds of police deployed around the school and nearby neighborhoods, including heavily armed units, and barricaded a wide perimeter around the school. Parents said pupils were still confined to the locked-down school more than three hours after the attack.<\/p>\n
Friday\u2019s attack came three years after a teacher was beheaded outside a school in suburban Paris. Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher, was murdered on Oct 16, 2020 \u2014 also a Friday \u2014 by an 18-year-old who had become radicalized. Like the suspect in Friday\u2019s stabbings, that attacker was of Chechen background.<\/p>\n
Martin Doussau, a philosophy teacher at the Gambetta high school, said the attacker appeared to be hunting for a history teacher.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was chased by the attacker who … asked me if I teach history. (He said), \u2018Are you a history teacher, are you a history teacher?\u2019\u201d said Doussau, who recounted how he barricaded himself behind a door until police used a stun gun to subdue the attacker.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen he turned around and asked me if I am a history teacher, I immediately thought of Samuel Paty,\u201d Doussau told reporters.<\/p>\n
The attack came amid heightened tensions around the world over Hamas\u2019 weekend attack on southern Israel and Israel\u2019s military response, which have killed hundreds of civilians on both sides. There have been calls in Muslim nations for mass protests after Friday prayers over Israel\u2019s intense bombing campaign in Gaza.<\/p>\n
Darmanin on Thursday ordered local authorities to ban all pro-Palestinian demonstrations amid a rise in antisemitic acts since the Hamas attack.<\/p>\n
France is estimated to have the world\u2019s third-largest Jewish population after Israel and the U.S., and the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.<\/p>\n
A vice president of France\u2019s lower house of parliament, Naima Moutchou, said the National Assembly \u201cexpresses its solidarity and thoughts for the victims, their families and the educational community as we learn that a teacher has been killed and several others have been injured.\u2033<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PARIS (AP) \u2014 A man armed with a knife killed a teacher at the high school in northern France he once attended and critically wounded another teacher and a security guard Friday, authorities said, an attack being investigated as potential terrorism amid soaring global tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas. French anti-terror prosecutors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-226098","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}