Lionel Gougelot (correspondent in Arras) / Photo credit: DENIS CHARLET / AFP 20:18 p.m., October 13, 2023

On Friday morning, a 20-year-old man, armed with a knife, burst into a high school in Arras where he fatally stabbed a teacher and injured three others before being arrested. A few hours after this attack, which caused shock, the scenario and the course of events became clearer.

Parents, students and the entire teaching staff are still in shock. This Friday morning, at around 11 a.m., a 20-year-old man of Chechen origin with an S file fatally stabbed a teacher and wounded three other people in a high school in Arras in the Pas-de-Calais region. He was arrested and taken into custody along with seven other people. Little by little, the scenario and the precise sequence of the morning's macabre events seem to take shape.

The French teacher tried to intervene

It was while trying to block the assailant's path that Dominique Bernard, a French teacher, fell, mortally wounded by the terrorist's first stab wounds. The killer then entered the school and attacked a second teacher, seriously injuring him.

>>

READ ALSO - INFO EUROPE 1 - Arras: Manuel Valls' cabinet had cancelled the detention of the assailant's family in 2014

Mohammed Mogushkov then took a third staff member of the school to task, in front of Martin Doussot, a professor of philosophy. "At that moment, I wanted to intervene very quickly by telling him 'but it's not possible, you can't do this' and I saw that he was chasing me. The person who was with me said, 'Don't go, he's very dangerous, he's got knives, you don't stand a chance.' So I turned around and had to walk away. I barricaded myself behind a glass door," he says.

At the end of this fatal journey, the assailant tried to flee but was arrested by police forces who used tasers, said Jean-François Ricard, the anti-terrorist prosecutor, in a press conference.

'It's horrifying'

A 1st grade student, who was upset, also saw the attacker attack the school's staff. "We were on the first floor and we just saw him walk into the high school and into the courtyard. The man was seen throwing the teacher to the ground, beating him. It's very traumatic, it's horrifying and when you know that a teacher has died... I can't imagine," she says.

>>

READ ALSO - Knife attack in Arras: 'I saw the killer approaching', Gambetta high school student testifies

This week, the students of the Gambetta high school were reminded of the safety instructions in the event of fire or intrusion. The latter seem to have been rather well respected and the students were confined for more than three hours. The last high school students who witnessed the attack were only released at the end of the afternoon after giving their testimonies to investigators from the judicial police and anti-terrorist forces.