Witnesses said the attacker shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is greatest” in Arabic. Radio station Europe 1 said the suspect was a man of Chechen origin and had been known to the security services for his involvement with radical Islam.
The suspect’s brother was detained near another school, according to Le Parisien.
The attack immediately recalled the case of Samuel Paty, a history and civics teacher who was decapitated in a Paris suburb nearly three years ago by a Chechen refugee, sparking a national debate about the influence of radical Islam.
“Three years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, horror once again strikes the educational community,” tweeted Laurent Brosse, the mayor of the town where that previous attack took place. “The terrorist act in #Arras brings back painful memories to us.”
Martin Doussau, a philosophy teacher at the Gambetta high school in Arras, said the attacker on Friday asked him specifically if he was a history teacher. That’s when “I understood it was a political act,” he told BFM television.
Fabien Dufay, a physical education teacher at the school, told BFM television that he recognized the attacker as a former student at the school, describing him “calm” and an “average student.”
The French Council of Muslim Faith condemned the “murderous and abject attack,” adding that the Allahu Akbar expression “erected by some as a slogan of cowardice and terrorist barbarity, has been dangerously overused, whereas in the Muslim spiritual tradition it is the symbol of the humility of Man before God.”
After a spate of high-profile terrorist attacks that put France on high alert and led to expanded powers for police, France has seen relatively few incidents in recent years. Earlier this year, a Syrian national stabbed four toddlers and two adults at a playground in southeastern France, an attack that Macron described as an act of “absolute cowardi