French school where teacher was stabbed evacuated over bomb alert

[October 16, 2023]  By Pascal Rossignol
 
ARRAS, France (Reuters) -A high school in Arras, northern France, where a French teacher was fatally stabbed on Friday, was evacuated on Monday morning following a bomb alert, according to a Reuters photographer who was at the location.  

French police and firefighters stand in front of the Gambetta-Carnot school, where French teacher Dominique Bernard was killed in a knife attack on Friday, after the school was evacuated following a bomb alert in Arras, northern France, October 16, 2023. REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol

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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