Emmanuel Macron has condemned what he called a “senseless wave of violence” after a 14-year-old pupil fatally stabbed a teaching assistant at a school.
The 31-year-old woman died in hospital after she was stabbed during a bag search at the start of the school day outside a middle school in Nogent, in the Haute-Marne department in north-east France.
The French president wrote on social media: “While protecting our children, a teaching assistant lost her life, the victim of a senseless wave of violence … The nation is in mourning and the government is mobilised to reduce crime.”
The education minister, Élisabeth Borne, wrote on social media: “I commend the composure and dedication of those who acted to subdue the attacker and protect the students and staff.”
The 14-year-old suspect, who was overpowered by gendarmes and is in police custody, was not previously known to police. Education officials told Agence France-Presse he “appeared to be a student at the school”.
Borne said the suspect was “a young man from a family where both parents work, who had not shown any particular difficulties.” He was an anti-bullying representative at the school.
She said: “Young people are shocked. They are also very shocked to see that one of their classmates could commit such a horrific act. And this classmate was very well integrated in the middle school.”
The teaching assistant, a former hairdresser who had been working at the school since September, received several knife wounds. She was the mother of a young boy. One of her cousins described her as “a very cheerful, very kind person.”
About 300 pupils at the school were locked down inside at the time of the boy’s arrest.
In March, French police started random searches for knives and other weapons concealed in bags in and around schools.
Élisabeth Allain-Moreno, the secretary general of the SE-Unsa teachers’ union, said the teaching assistant was “simply doing her job by welcoming students at the entrance to the school”. She said the attack “shows that nothing can ever be completely secure and that it is prevention that needs to be focused on”.
Jean-Rémi Girard, the president of the National Union of Secondary Schools, said: “It’s impossible to be more vigilant 24 hours a day. We can’t say that every student is a danger or a threat, otherwise we’d never get out of bed in the morning.”
The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen denounced what she called the “normalisation of extreme violence, encouraged by the apathy of the authorities”. She wrote on social media: “Not a week goes by without a tragedy striking a school. The French people have had enough and are waiting for a firm, uncompromising and determined political response to the scourge of juvenile violence.”
At the end of April, after a fatal attack at a school in Nantes, the education ministry reported that 958 random bag checks in schools had led to the seizure of 94 knives.
After that knife attack, which left one person dead and three injured, the prime minister, François Bayrou, called for more intensive checks around and inside schools.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
