Emmanuel Macron’s appeal for France to unite has not been heeded. Barely 12 hours after the president made his address on primetime television, a 20-year-old of Chechen origin stabbed a teacher to death and wounded two others in a high school in the northern city of Arras.
The assailant, now in custody, is reported to have shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during his rampage. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin announced that the knifeman was on an extremist watchlist, a revelation that is politically explosive. Yet again, someone known to be radicalised has been able to commit bloody murder. Just this week, the trial concluded of an accomplice of Larossi Abballa, who in 2016 fatally stabbed a married police couple in their home south of Paris. He, too, should have been under surveillance.
The assailant, now in custody, is reported to have shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during his rampage
The motivation for the attack has yet to be revealed.
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