In France, a young teenager who is accused of fatally stabbing his teacher in front of frightened students said he was “possessed.”
Soon after the incident in a private Catholic high school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a seaside town near the border with Spain, the 52-year-old female Spanish instructor passed away from a single stab wound caused by a “big knife.”
Police sources told French television station TF1 that the 16-year-old suspect claimed to have heard voices urging him to kill her after being apprehended.
A classmate, Inès, 16, said the attacker seemed ‘very calm’ as he approached the teacher and plunged the knife into her chest ‘without saying a thing’.
‘There had never been any problems between him and the teacher in class’, Inès added.
Another pupil said the attacker had got up from his seat in the middle of the lesson holding a wad of papers inside which he had concealed the weapon.
The suspect’s classmates were ‘aware that [he] had psychological problems’ and at least one believed he had been on medication for stress.
The teacher was said to have worked at the school for many years and was well-liked by colleagues and pupils.
France’s education minister, Pap Ndyiae, described the school of 1,000 pupils as a ‘peaceful establishment’ where ‘no one could have foreseen such a terrible tragedy’.
Announcing he was on his way to Saint-Jean-de-Luz to support the community, he tweeted: ‘Immense emotion following the death today of a teacher at Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin high school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
‘My thoughts go to their family, colleagues and students.’
Investigators say terrorism is not being considered as a motive, with a potential psychiatric disorder currently thought the most likely factor.
The beheading of French history and geography teacher Samuel Paty, 47, by a student in 2020 received worldwide attention after authorities described it as an ‘Islamist terrorist attack’.
Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, 18, who attended another school, travelled to Mr Paty’s town and murdered him in the street after seeing a video falsely claiming the teacher had asked pupils to leave before showing them a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.
It later emerged the video was made by the father of one of Mr Paty’s pupils and was based on lies she which she told him to deflect from her bad behaviour.