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Claiming to hear whispers from the occult, a student in France stabs his teacher to death. Photo/Illustration/Sindonews
PARIS – A high school student in French arrested by the police for allegedly stabbing a female teacher to death. The action was carried out in front of other students in a classroom of a school in southwest France.
“An investigation has been opened into alleged premeditated murder over an incident at a private Catholic school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz,” Bayonne prosecutor Jerome Bourrier said.
“Investigators can interview the suspect on Wednesday afternoon,” he added as reported by AP, Thursday (23/2/2023).
Bourrier said the student was previously unknown to police and the judiciary. Bourrier declined to provide further details amid the ongoing investigation.
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The incident prompted French Education Minister Pap Ndiaye, who is traveling to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, to announce a minute’s silence will be observed in all French schools on Thursday at 3pm local time.
He said around 90 students, including those who witnessed the attack, as well as several teachers, were being treated by the psychology unit.
A top government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss the matter publicly, said the first elements communicated by police indicated that the assailant had severe mental health problems.
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French media reported that the student born in 2007 said he heard voices telling him to kill the 53-year-old Spanish teacher.
French government spokesman Olivier Veran, speaking after the weekly cabinet meeting, expressed the government’s support for the educational community and said the incident was a trauma for the nation.
In 2020, teacher Samuel Paty was murdered outside his school in a Paris suburb by an 18-year-old refugee from Chechnya. The attacker was angry at a teacher showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class after the images were republished by a satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which was targeted in a 2015 attack.
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