Following a deadly attack in the northern city of Arras on Friday, the French government has raised the country’s terror threat metric to its highest level.
"In the current context and following the terrorist attack in Arras, I have decided to raise the Vigipirate [France's national security alert system] to the highest level of attack emergency," French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Friday.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said there was no specific threat, but said there was ‘’an extremely negative atmosphere’’ amid claimed threats by extremists in connection with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, a Palestinian militant group based in the Gaza Strip.
The minister added that authorities have detained 12 people near schools or houses of worship since Hamas’ attacks on several Israeli border settlements on Saturday, which killed hundreds of civilians. Security has been boosted at French Jewish sites around the country throughout the week.
A man of Chechen origin is in French custody on suspicion of stabbing a teacher to death at his former high school and seriously wounding three others in a stabbing attack in Arras.
The man was reportedly under surveillance by French authorities who suspected he had come under the sway of a radical Islamist ideology. Just a day before the attack, he had been detained for questioning based on his phone calls, which were being monitored, but investigators found no weapon or specific indicator of a threat of an attack by the man, according to Darmanin.
’’There was a race against the clock. But there was no threat, no weapon, no indication. We did our job seriously,″ Darmanin said in a French television interview.
The man and his brother have both been detained.
Speaking to the nation, French President Emmanuel Macron said France had been “hit once again by the barbarity of Islamist terrorism.”
“Nearly three years to the day after the assassination of Samuel Paty, terrorism has hit a school again and in a context that we’re all aware of,” Macron said in comments at the high school.
“The choice has been made not to give in to terror,” he said. “We must not let anything divide us, and we must remember that schools and the transmission of knowledge are at the heart of this fight against ignorance.”
Paty, a geography teacher in the Paris suburb of Éragny-sur-Oise, was killed and beheaded by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee, on October 16, 2020. Anzorov was reportedly motivated by claims Paty had shown her class cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed created by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2012 that had aroused fury in the Muslim community.
Anzorov was shot and killed by police in the encounter that followed Paty’s murder, but since then, 10 others have been charged with conspiring with and assisting the killer, including an imam, family members of the killer, and students at the school.