A teacher has been killed and two people were seriously injured in a knife attack at a school in France on Friday.
According to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanian, the attack happened at the Gambetta high school in the northern city of Arras.
A Russian national of Chechen origin was taken into custody by the police over suspected radicalisation. The accused was a former student of the high school.
The attack was being investigated as potential terrorism amid soaring global tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Sliman Hamzi, a police officer said the suspected attacker shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great in Arabic) during the attack.
A French language teacher was killed in the knife attack, while a sports teacher and a security guard got severely injured.
According to police, the situation is brought under control.
Meawhile, French President Emmanuel Macron visited the school hours after the attack. Macron said that victim stepped in and probably saved many lives. Police thwarted an attempted attack in another French region after the teacher's fatal stabbing, but he did not provide details, he added.
“I'm extremely shocked by what I saw," said a police officer said. "It was a horrible thing to see this poor man who was killed on the job by a lunatic,” he added.
Macron later went to see students from the school in an adjacent building and interacted with the concerned parents as well.
The suspect's brother was arrested in the summer of 2019 by the DGSI -- France's counter-terrorism intelligence service -- on suspicion of being involved in the planning of an attack that was thwarted and is in jail, French intelligence said, reported the Associated Press.
Police said another brother was taken into custody for questioning on Friday.
