A teacher was stabbed to death by a pupil in front of a packed class at a school in France.
The bloodbath unfolded on Wednesday morning at the Roman Catholic Thomas Aquinas private school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the southwestern Atlantic coast.
“A Spanish lesson was taking place, when the pupil launched a frenzied attack on the teacher,” said an investigating source.
The 16-year-old pupil was restrained before police and emergency service arrived, but it was too late to save the life of the teacher, who succumbed to her injuries.
“She was stabbed through the chest,” said the source, without naming either the attacker or the victim.
The pupil knifeman is said to have told police who arrested him that he was “possessed by the devil,” said the investigating source.
He was taken to a secure police station after the attack, which happened at about 10am.
The murdered female Spanish teacher was in her 50s and had taught at the school “for a number of years,” said a source at St Thomas Aquinas. “She was well liked and respected.”
Local prosecutor Jerome Bourrier confirmed that a murder enquiry had been opened, as public officials including Education Minister Pap Ndiaye visited the school.
Senator Frédérique Espagnac, who represents the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region in which the school is set said she “totally condemns this act of violence against a teacher”.
Just over two years ago – on October 16 2020 – history and geography teacher Samuel Paty was stabbed and beheaded near his school in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris.
The perpetrator was 18-year-old Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee from Chechnya who was killed by police soon after the murder.
Anzorov had no connection with Paty or the school, but had travelled from his home in Normandy to kill the teacher after watching a video posted by a pupil’s father who was angry that Paty had shown students images of the prophet of Islam in a civics class.
