France tightens security at its schools following terrorist murder of teacher

The French Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, has given instructions for the immediate reinforcement of security in schools after the terrorist murder this morning of a teacher in a lycée in Arras by a young Chechen who was on the secret service's visor. 

In a message issued by his department, Attal called for "all necessary measures" to be taken to "reinforce the security of all schools" in the country after the attack, which has been investigated by the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (PNAT). 

Since last Saturday, when the Hamas terrorist offensive on Israeli territory began, France had increased its security arrangements at 500 synagogues and Jewish schools in the country. 

It remains to be seen what the generalisation of the measure to all schools means after the attack by a 20-year-old at the Lycée Gambetta in the town of Arras (north), where he had been a student, where he killed a French teacher with a knife and wounded two other people. 

The assailant, who shouted "Allah is the greatest" in Arabic, is Mohamed Mogouchkov, a Chechen born in Russia in 2003 who, according to Le Figaro, has been registered by the secret services for Islamist radicalism. A Russian national, he arrived in France in 2007. He had been under surveillance since this summer. 

He was quickly arrested by the police, a teacher told the television channel BFMTV. To do so, the officers used a stun gun to paralyse him. 

The murdered teacher, whose carotid artery was severed by the attacker, is Dominique Bernard, in his fifties, according to La Voix du Nord, which added that the two injured, who were admitted to Arras hospital, one of them between life and death, are the deputy headmaster and another teacher. 

 The killer's brother, who was also under the radar of the secret services, was arrested near the Lycée Saint Exupéry in Arras shortly after the attack, which led to the confinement of the pupils of the Lycée Gambetta, but also of the other schools in the town. 

Another teacher there, Martin Doussau, told BFMTV that he came across the assassin without knowing what was happening, and that he ran away when he noticed he was being chased and asked if he was a history teacher.

From this and the memory of what happened in another school where a history teacher was killed by a Chechen terrorist, his interpretation is that "he was trying to kill a history teacher".

On 16 October 2020, teacher Samuel Paty was murdered near the school where he taught in Conflans Sainte Honorine, in the Paris region, by a Chechen fundamentalist terrorist who had taken refuge with his family in France.