France has declared an alert of maximum security amid fears of an “imminent threat of a terrorist attack”.
The alert reads: “Attack emergency. Vigilance and maximum protection in the event of an imminent threat of a terrorist act or directly after an attack.”
It comes after authorities said a man of Chechen origin who was under surveillance by French security services over suspected Islamic radicalisation stabbed a teacher to death at his former high school and critically wounded three other people Friday in northern France.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the attack was “linked to events in the Middle East” as he announced the state of emergency.
The attack is being investigated by anti-terror prosecutors amid soaring global tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas. It also happened almost three years after another teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a radicalised Chechen near a Paris area school.
READ MORE: Teacher killed in stabbing as attacker shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’
President Emmanuel Macron said France had been “hit once again by the barbarity of Islamist terrorism.”
“Nearly three years to the day after the assassination of Samuel Paty, terrorism has hit a school again and in a context that we’re all aware of,” Macron said at the site of the attack in Arras, a city 115 miles (185 kilometres) north of Paris.
The suspected assailant in Arras was arrested, and several others are also in custody, national counterterrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said.
The National Police force identified him as a Russian national of Chechen origin who was born in 2003.
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The French intelligence services told The Associated Press the man had been closely watched since the summer with tails and telephone surveillance and was stopped as recently as Thursday for a police check that found no wrongdoing.
The French President also said that at least 13 French citizens were confirmed to have been killed in the attack by Hamas in Israel but 17 more “children and adults” were missing and “without doubt some of them are held hostage”.
He added: “I want to say that we will do everything to ensure that these hostages, whatever their nationality, are released.”
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