An investigative police officer arrives at a pre-school in Paris suburb Aubervilliers on Monday. — AP
An investigative police officer arrives at a pre-school in Paris suburb Aubervilliers on Monday. — AP
A teacher in a Paris suburb was attacked Monday by a man wielding a box cutter and scissors who cited the ISIS jihadist group, sources in the police and prosecutor’s office said.
The assault comes after the ISIS in November urged its followers to kill teachers in the French education system for teaching secularism and being “in open war against the Muslim family”. The 45-year-old man was stabbed in the side and throat while preparing for his class at a school in Aubervilliers, northeast of Paris, but his life was not in danger, a police source said.
The attacker was dressed in overalls and a balaclava and arrived without a weapon but grabbed what appeared to be a box cutter that was lying in the classroom as well as a pair of scissors. According to local prosecutors the man shouted: “This is Daesh. This is a warning.” The brief exchange was reported by a witness working inside the school.
The attacker fled after stabbing the teacher and the probe has been taken over by anti-terrorist investigators. The ISIS’s French-language magazine Dar-al-Islam called in its November edition for its followers to kill teachers in the French education system, describing th-em as “enemies of Allah”. “This education, in the case of France in particular, is a means of propaganda used to impose the corrupt way of thought established by the Judeo-masonry,” it said.
While the motivations of the attacker were not yet clear, the assault comes as France remains on high alert.
