France mobilizes 7,000 troops after school stabbing blamed on a Muslim
President Emmanuel Macron has ordered the deployment of 7,000 troops after France was put on its highest security alert following the death of teacher in a fatal stabbing attack.
Macron’s office announced the order on Saturday, just a day after a suspected 20-year-old man of Chechen origin reportedly stabbed to death a teacher at a school in the northeastern town of Arras.
The assailant, who had been under surveillance by French domestic intelligence, severely wounded three others, including a school security guard, before he was arrested.
After visiting the Gambetta-Carnot high school, Macron branded the attack as an act of “Islamist terror".
No students at the school were hurt in the attack, police added.
According to the Elysee presidential palace, the mobilization of Operation Sentinelle troops in cities and towns will be completed by Monday evening.
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 guard high-risk areas such as transport hubs, tourist sites and religious buildings.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has said there was “probably a link between what’s happening in the Middle East and this incident” in Arras, referring to a ongoing war between the Palestinian Hamas resistance group and Israel that began last week.
Macron was quick to link the incident to the October 2020 attack in which another Chechen killed a teacher named Samuel Paty near his school in a Paris suburb.
“Three years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, terrorism has struck a school again and in a context that we all know,” he said.
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