French police thwarted an attack on a Jewish school in Marseille on Friday, according to reports. The police arrested a man who was attempting to carry out a stabbing attack at the school, French media said.
The attacker, whose identity has not been revealed, had targeted the Yavne School on Friday morning, when security guards foiled the attempt. The school was immediately locked and secured but the attacker then tried to stab Jewish shoppers at a nearby kosher supermarket, The Jerusalem Post reported.
In a similar attack in 2016, a French minor had stabbed a Jewish man outside a synagogue in Marseille. The city has often witnessed anti-semitic attacks. In a horrific terror attack in 2017, a man with Tunisian citizenship killed two women at a train station in Marseille.
The southern French town of Trebes had seen another horrific attack on a supermarket in March 2018 when an Islamist gunman killed four people. The gunman, Redouane Lakdim, 25, had been on an extremist watchlist and was known to authorities as a petty criminal, but intelligence services had determined he did not post a threat. The attacker was shot dead by the police.
Lakdim, who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terror group, was said to have demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the most important surviving suspect in the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people.
France saw a wave of terror attacks last year, after President Emmanuel Macron defended the right of publications to publish the cartoon of Prophet Mohammed.
Two people were decapitated and another person was killed in a terror attack in Nice in October 2020. The stabbing incident took place inside the Notre Dame basilica.
The attack came even as France was still lamenting the beheading of a middle school teacher named Samuel Paty. The attacker killed Paty for showing cartoons of Prophet Mohammad in a civics lesson.
