Guadeloupe: 600 high school students confined to their school after a threat of attack

Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credit: LOU BENOIST / AFP 19:52 p.m., November 17, 2023

600 high school students were confined on Friday for two hours due to a threat of attack in their school in Lamentin, Guadeloupe, and a young student at this high school was placed in police custody after a threatening message on the social network X, we learned from the gendarmerie. "We had a threat of an attack against the high school in Lamentin (a town in the north of Basse-Terre, editor's note), a tweet went off last night, where a young man threatened to attack the school, to blow it up with him as well," Lieutenant-Colonel Isabelle Denis-Hoareau, commander of the Pointe-à-Pitre company, told AFP.

A 16-year-old boy arrested at his internship site

About fifteen gendarmes were deployed to secure the establishment from 8:30 a.m. local time (13:30 p.m. in Paris). "We had to trigger the PPMS (Special Safety Plan) lockdown as long as we had not removed the doubt about the threat," added the senior gendarmerie officer. No one could leave the facility.

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Identified on Friday morning, a 16-year-old teenager was arrested at his training site "flexibly at first, but accompanied by forces just in case", according to the same source. The teenager, "described as a withdrawn youth, a geek," had written that "he was fed up, [that] he was going to blow up his high school and him with it," according to the lieutenant-colonel. "Searches are underway" but had not uncovered, by midday Friday, the presence of explosives or weapons, according to the same source. The students "were released from lockdown at 11:30 a.m." (16:30 p.m. in Paris), it was said.

Placed in police custody, the teenager is suspected, for the time being, of "threatening a crime in writing against persons".