The psychological state of a 16 year-old lycée student who fatally stabbed his Spanish teacher on Thursday morning is at the centre of an investigation for premeditated murder.
The young man said he was possessed and heard voices in the night telling him to kill the teacher, who was 52 years old. He allegedly stabbed her in the heart with a 10cm ceramic knife. She died after the arrival of emergency services.
The attack took place at about 10am at the Lycée Saint Thomas d’Aquin, a private Catholic school in the centre of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a resort town on the Atlantic coast in southwest France.
“I didn’t see him get up but I saw him facing the teacher, very calm and he approached her and planted a big knife in her chest, without saying a word,” a student called Inès (16), told reporters outside the school. “We didn’t know how to react. A student opened the door and we all left.”
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No one knew of any conflict between the murdered teacher and her alleged assassin.
The assailant went to another classroom where a teacher took the knife from him. He is in police custody.
The victim was identified only by her first name, Agnès. She was childless and lived with a partner. Rudolf Cassarro, an official at the national union of Christian teachers SNEC-CFTC, of which she was a member, described her as “very experienced, liked by her colleagues and students in a school where there were no scholastic problems”.
“I met her when she arrived here about 20 years ago,” a former colleague of the victim told Le Figaro. “She was a discreet person who did her work well.”
“Nothing indicated that such a horrible tragedy could take place,” Pape Ndiaye, the education minister said after travelling from Paris to the scene of the crime. “This is a quiet school, serious and serene ... The investigation will come. Today is the time for emotion and solidarity.”
Mr Ndiaye announced that a minute’s silence will be observed in schools throughout France at 3pm on Friday. “This is a sad day for national education. We have been struck by the solidarity and dignity of teachers, who asked first about their students,” he said. “That shows the strength and solidity of the educational community in this establishment.”
“I can hardly imagine the trauma that this represents,” government spokesman Olivier Véran said on confirming news of the attack following the weekly cabinet meeting at the Élysée Palace.
Another teachers’ union, the SNES-FSU, expressed “shock and immense pain” on Twitter.
The 1,100 students at the school come under the authority of the diocese and were described as being from affluent backgrounds.
Nearly two and a half years ago, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher in the Paris region, was stabbed and then beheaded near the school where he taught by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee who reproached him for having shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed in a class on tolerance.
Thursday’s killing stirred memories of Paty’s murder, though police exclude an Islamist motive at this stage.
Ninety 11th year students, including those in the Spanish class and two other classes, were entrusted to the care of a psychological unit for several hours. All other students were kept inside their classrooms until noon, when their parents came to fetch them.
At least seven other teachers have been murdered in France since 1983. John Dowling, an Irishman who taught English west of Paris, was stabbed to death in December 2018 by a former student who had been expelled from the private university where Dowling taught.
