A 12-year-old girl in Kleber Secondary School in French leaves teachers with fear.
Teachers from Kleber secondary school in Strasbourg, eastern France, hold a banner decrying violence and a lack of resources available to them, Strasbourg, eastern France, December 7, 2023.© Frederick Florin, AFP
A 12-year-old schoolgirl threatened a teacher with a knife at a school in northern France on Wednesday, the latest in a growing number of incidents that have raised tensions in the French education system.
Issued on: 13/12/2023 – 17:03
Teachers from Kleber secondary school hold a banner during a protest to ask for more resources after some incidents took place, including threats, in Strasbourg, eastern France on December 7, 2023.
No-one was injured in the incident in the northwestern city of Rennes but prosecutors said that they have opened a criminal investigation.
“This morning, a pupil threatened a teacher with a knife during a lesson. The pupils, shocked, were immediately moved to safety,” the local education authority said in a statement.
Born in 2011, the schoolgirl “came to class armed with a large knife with the apparent intention of killing her English teacher,” said Rennes prosecutor Philippe Astruc.
“During the lesson, in class, she brandished the knife at the victim who fled running” before she was “disarmed by the staff of the establishment” of the Hautes Ourmes junior high school, he added.
They have a large Muslim and Jewish communities, sometimes linked to the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which has caused the graduate progressive tension to the people of France through their schools.
In October, a radicalised Islamist stabbed his former teacher Dominique Bernard to death in the northern town of Arras.
Earlier this week teachers at a school outside Paris refused to work after a group of pupils objected to the showing in class of a painting by Renaissance master Giuseppe Cesari containing several nude women.
Nevertheless, a French court last week convicted six teenagers for their role in the 2020 killing of teacher Samuel Paty outside his secondary school near Paris by a radicalised Islamist.
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A 12-year-old girl in Kleber Secondary School in French leaves teachers with fear
