The French high school which saw a suspected Islamist terror attack last week was evacuated again Monday morning over a possible bomb threat.
The Gambetta High School in Arras, northern France was not due to have any classes taught on Monday but was open to the public as part of a national day of mourning for two teachers killed in terror attacks in the country, with a minute of silence observed in all schools across France today. Yet the institution was evacuated on Monday morning after a bomb threat was received by internet message, France’s Le Figaro reports.
The bomb squad was deployed and the school reopened to the public in the early afternoon.
Tributes are being given today as planned to Samuel Paty, the French school teacher who was murdered by a radical Islamist on this day three years ago. His day of remembrance took on heightened importance after another teacher was killed last week on Friday, again — it is suspected — by a radicalised Muslim. Three others were also injured.
Paty was beheaded outside his own school in a Paris suburb by a teenage Chechen Muslim refugee, the culmination of a campaign against the teacher because she showed his pupils a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad while teaching a class on tolerance and freedom.
While the motive for the killing of Dominique Bernard, who was slain with a knife last week and was also allegedly attacked in the neck by a Chechen Muslim refugee, is not yet conclusively proven, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said today in her tribute to the slain teachers: “three years ago, Islamist terrorism struck savagely… three years later the barbarity and [counter-enlightenment] have struck again… barbarism will never prevail in the face of knowledge, the Republic will never bend in the face of terrorism”.
