A female teaching assistant was stabbed to death by one of her students during a bag search at a school in France.
The 31-year-old was attacked several times with a knife outside the Françoise Dolto secondary school in Nogent on Tuesday.
She was said to have been taken into care in ‘absolute emergency’ before succumbing to her injuries.
The offending pupil, 15, was arrested and taken into custody after the attack. They ‘appeared to be a student at the school’ and did not have a criminal record, authorities said.
A gendarme detaining the student suffered a slight hand injury during the arrest, the gendarmerie said.
The motive for the attack still remains unclear.
French President Emmanuel Macron denounced what he called a ‘senseless wave of violence’, adding: ‘We all stand with her family, her loved ones, her colleagues and the entire educational community.’
‘The nation is in mourning and the government is mobilised to reduce crime,’ he added.
French daily JHM reported that the attack in occurred shortly before 8.30am at the entrance to the school during a bag search for knives and concealed weapons.
France has witnessed a spate of deadly knife attacks in schools in recent months. In April, a teenage girl was killed and three students injured in a stabbing attack at a private school in western France.
Law enforcement officers were instructed to carry out bag checks at schools across the country from March in a bid to quell the violence.
By April, the education ministry reported that some 958 bag checks in schools had resulted in the seizure of 94 knives – nearly one in every ten bag searched.
A general view of the Françoise Dolto secondary school in Nogent, eastern France
The victim, whose identity is not yet known, had only been working at the school since the start of the school year, local media reports.
She was ‘simply doing her job by welcoming students at the entrance to the school’, said Elisabeth Allain-Moreno, secretary general of the SE-UNSA teachers’ union, expressing ‘immense pain’.
Allain-Moreno said that the attack ‘shows that nothing can ever be completely secure and that it is prevention that needs to be focused on.’
A large emergency response force was quickly scrambled and support offered to students and teachers in the wake of the attack.
Some 324 students were placed in lockdown. Classes today and tomorrow were called off and students told to return home in small groups.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen denounced what she called the ‘normalisation of extreme violence, encouraged by the apathy of the authorities.’
‘Not a week goes by without a tragedy striking a school,’ Le Pen said on X.
‘The French people have had enough and are waiting for a firm, uncompromising and determined political response to the scourge of juvenile violence.’
Education Minister Élisabeth Borne, who introduced the bag searches, said she would go to Nogent ‘to support the entire school community and the police’.
It was the first year such bag checks had been coordinated at the school as part of a national push.
The rectorate said that there had been ‘no particular difficulties’ at the school until now.
The bag checks had been organised well in advance, in conjunction with the gendarmerie, it added.
Jean-Remi Girard, president of the National Union of Secondary Schools, said: ‘It’s impossible to be more vigilant 24 hours a day.
‘We can’t say that every student is a danger or a threat, otherwise we’d never get out of bed in the morning.’
Ms Borne announced in February that bag searches would be implemented across the country this year, citing concerns about ‘a much more widespread use of bladed weapons’ among young people.
The searches, she said, would be carried out by law enforcement officers and not teachers or assistants, ‘since this does not fall within the remit of education personnel’, the minister said at the time.
Police started carrying out random searches for knives and concealed weapons at schools in March.
Your browser does not support iframes.
The attack and bag searches follow a series of violent attacks in French schools.
In February, a 17-year-old high school student was seriously injured with a knife in the quad of his school in Bagneux.
Then in April, a teenage girl was killed and three students injured in a stabbing attack at a private school in western France.
The attacker was restrained at the scene after being restrained by a teacher at the Notre-Dame-de-Toutes-Aides school in Nantes.
After that attack, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou called for ‘more intensive checks around and inside schools’.