SAINT LUZ: A teacher at a school in southwest France was killed on Wednesday in a stabbing attack by a teenage pupil in the middle of a lesson, the regional prosecutor said.

The teacher of Spanish, 52, was teaching a class at the school in the seaside town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz when the pupil, 16, attacked her with a knife. She was given emergency aid at the scene, but Bayonne prosecutor Jerome Bourrier said she died of her wounds. The pupil was arrested and was now being questioned by police in detention, he added.

The local daily Sud Ouest said the boy stormed into the teacher’s Spanish class with a knife and attacked her.

The school, Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, is a private and Catholic-based establishment close to the centre of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, which in summer is one of France’s best loved resorts on the sandy Basque country coast.

By lunchtime, pupils were gradually leaving the premises after being confined to their classrooms for around two hours after the stabbing. Anxious parents were waiting for them but only those parents of the class where the stabbing happened were allowed to enter the school, a reporter said.

France’s Education Minister Pap Ndiaye said he was “extremely upset” by the death of the teacher and would be heading to the scene. “I can barely imagine the trauma that this represents at a local level and more generally on a national scale,” said government spokesman Olivier Veran.

The BFM television channel said that the attacker had locked the classroom door and stabbed the teacher in the chest. The channel quoted a source as saying that the boy then told another teacher that a “voice” had told him to carry out the action.

Published in Dawn, February 23th, 2023