A 12-year-old student threatened her English teacher with a large knife on Wednesday and chased her through the school hallways, with the apparent intention of killing her, in Rennes, in the French region of Brittany. Other teachers managed to overpower the girl and disarm her, before the police took her to a police station, where she was detained. No one was injured.
The news caused an impact because it occurred two months after, day after day, the murder of a teacher in Arras, in the north of the country, a crime committed by a radicalized Muslim former student, originally from the Russian Caucasus. Three years earlier, another teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a Chechen for having shown caricatures of Muhammad in class.
Nothing indicated this Wednesday that there was an Islamist motivation in the Rennes case, although the girl had said she wanted to do "like in Arras." "Today I'm crazy and I feel like killing someone, I feel like killing students who don't love me or the person in front of me; it happened in Arras and I'm going to do the same," the girl told the teacher, in low voice, as the public prosecutor in Rennes, Philippe Astruc, explained to the press. This partly confirmed the information of another student, who had spoken of possible revenge because the teacher took her mobile phone last week. This hypothesis does not seem very likely to the prosecutor as the main reason for acting.
The knife had a 17 centimeter blade. The teacher, upon seeing him, ordered the students to immediately leave the classroom. That's when the girl tried to attack the teacher and went after her. The cold blood and quick reaction of other teachers, including the Spanish teacher, was decisive in avoiding a drama.
The attacker, born in Marseille to parents from Mongolia, had a violent history and had been expelled from another school. Her psychological state is being analyzed in a hospital to determine if she can be sanctioned at the administrative level, although due to her age - under 13 years old - she has not incurred criminal responsibility. Astruc indicated that her "psychological or psychiatric dimension" seemed "dominant" in what happened, according to her first investigations.
The incident coincides with an intense national debate on immigration, with a new law on the subject that is stuck in Parliament due to lack of consensus and all this in the context of a widespread feeling of insecurity, violence and lack of authority. The situation in schools is especially worrying. The right and the extreme right have more and more arguments to prescribe severity and a Copernican turn in immigration policy. This problem will play a central role in the European elections next June, in which, according to polls, Marine Le Pen's far-right party, the National Regroupment (RN), is clearly ahead of President Emmanuel Macron's party, Renaissance .
