The pupil stabs 4 others, a mortally, in a French high school, say the managers

A teenager in a French high school in the western city in Nantes stabbed four other students during a lunch break on Thursday, killing one of them and injuring the others before being dominated and arrested, the authorities said.

Police did not immediately identify the attacker, but the French media said that a student, said he was 15 or 16, was responsible for the attack. BFM TV reported that the killed student was a woman. There was no apparent indication of a terrorist reason for the attack, but the office of the anti -terrorist prosecutor confirmed that he was asking the case.

Élisabeth Borne, Minister of Education, and Bruno Retailleau, the Minister of the Interior, both rushed to the scene. The knife attacks in schools have become a problem of particular sensitivity in France after a series of incidents, including the deadly stab wounds of a teacher by a student in a private school in the southwest city of St.-Jean-de-Luz in February 2023, and several other recent minor attacks.

The French information media reported that the attacker on Thursday stabbed sent an electronic message earlier in the day to school denouncing the state of the world, in particular “systemic violence” and “social alienation”. The police did not immediately comment on his writings.

The document said that “the information society is actually a huge packaging operation”, aimed at “making human beings docile, predictable and programmable”.

The attack took place at the private school Notre-Dame-de-Toutes-Aides, which was quickly surrounded by the police and the military forces. The local newspaper in France said that the attacker had a helmet and a hood and was dressed in black, and that two knives, including a hunting knife, were found with his property.