France yesterday said it would deploy 7,000 soldiers after declaring a top-level alert following the fatal stabbing of a teacher at a school by a man of Chechen origin, who also severely wounded three others.
The attack took place in the northeastern town of Arras, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations.
Police arrested the suspected attacker, Mohammed Moguchkov, who had cried the Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar (“God is great”), according to preliminary elements of the investigation.
Photo: AFP
Authorities have suggested a probable link to the violence in the Middle East, with French President Emmanuel Macron denouncing the incident as an act of “Islamist terror.”
The deployment of the soldiers from Operation Sentinelle would completed by tomorrow evening, the Elysee Palace said.
Sentinelle is a French military operation with 10,000 soldiers and 4,700 police and gendarmes deployed since the aftermath of the January 2015 attacks to protect parts of the country deemed sensitive from terrorism.
“This school was struck by the barbarity of Islamist terrorism,” Macron said after visiting the school, adding that the victim had “probably saved many lives” with his courage in blocking the attacker.
Macron said another attempted attack elsewhere had been foiled by security forces.
The French Ministry of the Interior said the president was referring to the arrest of a “radicalized” man who was arrested leaving a prayer hall in the Yvelines region of Paris for carrying a prohibited weapon.
French Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin later said the there was “probably a link between what’s happening in the Middle East and this incident” in Arras.
France upped its alert level to the highest position following a crunch security meeting chaired by Macron on Friday, the prime minister’s office said.
A total of eight people were in police custody on Friday, a police source said.
In addition to the attacker, several members of his family were arrested “for the purposes of the investigation,” including one of his brothers and his sister, other police sources said.
Moguchkov’s 17-year-old brother was detained close to another school, police said.
The national anti-terrorist prosecutor announced that it has opened an investigation.
Moguchkov, who is in his 20s, is from Russia’s mainly Muslim southern Caucasus region of Chechnya. He was already on a French national register known as “Fiche S” as a potential security threat, a police source said, and under electronic and physical surveillance by the French General Directorate for Internal Security.
The victim, a French teacher, was stabbed in the throat and chest.
Among those wounded were a school security guard who was stabbed multiple times and is fighting for his life, and a teacher in a less serious condition, the source added.
A cleaner was also hurt, anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said.
The pupils and teachers were confined to the school premises before being allowed out in the afternoon.
A large security cordon was set up around the school where parents had gathered, and police, firefighters and emergency services were deployed, Agence France-Presse journalists reported.
Martin Dousseau, a philosophy teacher who witnessed the attack, described a moment of panic during break-time, when schoolchildren found themselves face-to-face with the armed man.
“He attacked canteen staff. I wanted to go down to intervene, he turned to me, chased me and asked me if I was a history and geography teacher,” Dousseau said. “We barricaded ourselves in, then the police arrived and immobilized him.”
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