Elite police officers of the RAID squad patrol after a man armed with a knife killed a teacher and wounded two others at a high school in northern France, Friday, Oct. 13, 2023 in Arras. Antiterror prosecutors said they were leading the investigation into the attack at the Gambetta high school in the city of Arras, some 115 miles north of Paris.
A colleague and a fellow teacher identified the dead educator as Dominique Bernard, a French language teacher at the school. 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 “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great” in Arabic.
Macron then went to see students from the school in an adjacent building. School attacks are rare in France, and the government asked authorities to heighten vigilance at all schools across the country. Friday’s attack had echoes of Paty’s slaying on Oct 16, 2020 — also a Friday — by an 18-year-old who had become radicalized. Like the suspect in Friday’s stabbings, the attacker had a Chechen background.