A 37-year-old male teacher was stabbed on Tuesday while breaking up a fight between two pupils at a school in the south-east suburbs of Paris.

"/> A 37-year-old male teacher was stabbed on Tuesday while breaking up a fight between two pupils at a school in the south-east suburbs of Paris.

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CRIME

Teacher stabbed while breaking up fight

A 37-year-old male teacher was stabbed on Tuesday while breaking up a fight between two pupils at a school in the south-east suburbs of Paris.

Published: 8 February 2012 08:50 CET

The attack happened at the 1,200 pupil Maximilien-Perret school in Alfortville when two older students started arguing at around 10.15am.

One teacher told Le Parisien newspaper how staff tried to stop the fight.

“With my colleague, we tried to separate them,” said Guillaume Lombardeau, a maths teacher.

Lombardeau explained that one of the pupils got out a knife and “in the struggle, my colleague got hurt.”

The injured teacher was taken to a local hospital where his condition was not believed to be life threatening.

One of the boys was held by police shortly after the incident, while the other fled the scene and is still being hunted.

A union representative told Le Parisien that the attack took place in circumstances that are “more and more difficult and tense because there is less and less time spent with the pupils.”

Additional security has been sent to the school, which will reopen on Wednesday.

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CRIME

French teen dies from heart failure after knife attack near school

A 14-year-old girl has died of a heart attack in eastern France after her school locked down to protect itself from a knife attacker who lightly wounded two other girls, an official said on Friday.

Published: 20 April 2024 08:58 CEST
French teen dies from heart failure after knife attack near school

The teenager “was rescued by teachers who were very fast to call the fire department. She died at the end of the afternoon,” education official Olivier Faron said.

The girl’s middle school in the village of Souffelweyersheim closed its doors on Thursday afternoon after a man stabbed two other girls aged 7 and 11 outside a nearby primary facility.

“Sadly this pupil underwent an episode of very high stress that led to a heart attack,” Faron said.

A mother outside the middle school on Friday morning said her son in first year of secondary had also been scared during the lockdown the previous day.

“Whereas in the primary school they made it more like a game, perhaps here it was a little too direct,” Deborah Wendling said.

“He thought there was an armed person in the school. They could hear doors slamming, but in fact it was just other classrooms locking down.”

Faron defended the teachers.

READ ALSO: Schoolgirl threatens teacher with knife as tensions rise in French schools

“There is no perfect solution,” he said.

But “we will analyse in depth what happened. If there are lessons to be taken from this, we will take them.”

The two girls hurt in the attack were discharged from hospital on Thursday evening with only light wounds.

Police have arrested the 30-year-old assailant, and a probe has been opened into “attempted murder of minors”, the prosecutor’s office said.

It was not immediately clear what had motivated him, but it did not appear to be “a terrorist act”, it said.

He was “psychiatrically fragile” and appeared to have stopped his medication.

The incident follows a series of attacks on schoolchildren by their peers, in particularly the fatal beating earlier this month of Shemseddine, 15, outside Paris.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on Thursday announced measures to crack down on teenage violence in and around schools.

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