French teacher killed in attack by student who claimed to 'be possessed'

The 50-year-old female Spanish teacher died from injuries inflicted by the attacker, a 16-year-old student, said French government spokesperson Olivier Veran.

The assailant was a teenager suffering from psychological troubles who claimed to “be possessed” after stabbing the teacher in the chest, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.

BFMTV reported that, following the attack in the town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the assailant fled into a neighbouring room where he told a teacher that a voice had told him to commit the attack.

The teacher took the weapon from the student and remained with him until police arrived, BFMTV said.

The incident occurred at the private Catholic school Saint-Thomas d’Aquin secondary school, in the Pyrenees-Atlantiques region of southwestern France, according to the local prefecture.

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The French Education Minister, Pap Ndiaye, tweeted that he will be visiting the scene “without delay.”

Veran, speaking after a weekly Cabinet meeting, paid his condolences to those affected by the attack.

“I can hardly imagine the trauma that this can represent, locally and more generally on a national scale,” Veran told journalists Wednesday, adding on Twitter that there are “no words to describe the tragedy.”

In 2020, teacher Samuel Paty was killed outside his school in suburban Paris by an 18-year-old refugee of Chechen origin who was angry that he had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class after the images were re-published by a satirical newspaper targeted in a 2015 attack.