Friday's attack, which prompted the government to put France on
its highest security alert, came as a "jihadist atmosphere" had
developed, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said over the
weekend, after a deadly Hamas attack on Israel unleashed
retaliatory measures and air strikes.
While there were no classes scheduled on Monday at the Lycee
Gambetta high school, its doors were open for pupils and staff
to pay tribute to teacher Dominique Bernard, who was killed by a
20-year-old man in an attack that President Emmanuel Macron
condemned as "barbaric Islamic terrorism."
Macron posted a message on social media platform X to pupils and
school staff earlier on Monday: "If I'm speaking to you, it is
to assure you all that we stand with you."
"We will always counter blind hatred with the inextinguishable
thirst to teach. The thirst to learn. The thirst to live
freely".
On Friday, the attacker, a former pupil whose elder brother was
serving time in prison for links to Islamist militant networks,
fatally stabbed Bernard and wounded three other people.
After the bomb alert on Monday, teachers, some of them in tears
and holding each other, left the building, as did pupils who had
come to lay flowers in tribute to Bernard.
As a police bomb squad arrived, teachers and students gathered
in the courtyard of a building opposite their school as civil
protection personnel comforted them.
A minute of silence is planned for later in the day in schools
across the country.
(Reporting by Pascal Rossignol; Writing by Ingrid Melander;
Editing by Toby Chopra, Sudip Kar-Gupta and Bernadette Baum)
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