French high school where teacher was killed evacuated over bomb alert

ARRAS, France - A high school in Arras, northern France, where a teacher was

fatally stabbed last Friday

, was evacuated on Monday following a bomb alert, according to a Reuters photographer who was at the location.

Friday’s attack, which

prompted the government to put France on its highest security alert

, came as a “jihadist atmosphere” developed, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said, after a deadly Hamas attack on Israel unleashed retaliatory measures and air strikes.

While there were no classes scheduled on Monday at the Lycee Gambetta high school, its doors were open for students and staff to pay tribute to teacher Dominique Bernard, who was killed by a 20-year-old man in an attack that President Emmanuel Macron condemned as “barbaric Islamic terrorism”.

Mr Macron posted a message on social media platform X to students and school staff earlier on Monday, saying: “If I’m speaking to you, it is to assure you all that we stand with you.

“We will always counter blind hatred with the inextinguishable thirst to teach. The thirst to learn. The thirst to live freely.”

Last Friday, the attacker, a former student whose elder brother is serving time in prison for links to Islamist militant networks, fatally stabbed Mr Bernard and wounded three other people.

After the bomb alert on Monday, teachers, some of them in tears and holding one another, left the building, as did students who had come to lay flowers in tribute to Mr Bernard. As a police bomb squad arrived, teachers and students gathered in the courtyard of a building opposite their school as civil protection personnel comforted them.

Middle and high schools across France held a minute of silence for Mr Bernard on Monday.

Early lessons were cancelled in middle and high schools to allow teachers to discuss the attack and how to deal with it in front of students.

“It was very important for us to meet, it lowers tensions because as teachers, we’re very alone,” said Mr Benjamin Marol, a history teacher at a school in Montreuil just outside Paris.

Mr Bernard was killed almost three years to the day after teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by a radicalised Chechen refugee outside his school in a Paris suburb, on Oct 16, 2020.

The families of Mr Paty’s killer and the suspected Arras assailant share a background in Russia’s North Caucasus region. REUTERS, AFP