FILE PHOTO: French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou leaves following the weekly cabinet meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, June 4, 2025. REUTERS/Abdul Saboor/ File Photo
PARIS (Reuters) -French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou on Tuesday said the government plans to test adding security gates at schools after a 14-year-old student allegedly stabbed a school assistant to death in the town of Nogent during a bag search for weapons.
Police were questioning the teenager, who was being held at the gendarmerie in Nogent in the northeast, the Haute-Marne Prefecture said.
The killing of the 31-year-old school assistant was roundly condemned by France's political class, sparking soul searching about how such a violent act could be carried out by a minor.
"While watching over our children in Nogent, an educational assistant lost her life, the victim of a senseless wave of violence," President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X. "The nation is in mourning and the government is mobilized to reduce crime."
The Chaumont public prosecutor Denis Devallois said the alleged suspect had stabbed the school assistant several times with a knife.
The killing was not an isolated incident, Bayrou told lawmakers, and France could not afford to ignore this wave of child violence.
"We cannot remain indifferent and watch this advancing wave with our arms lowered," he said.
"The government intends to move towards experimenting with security gates at the entrance to schools," Bayrou said, adding that he wanted to ban certain blades, as currently "a certain number of these knives are not considered weapons."
The attack came on the same day that a gunman in Austria killed at least nine people at a secondary school in the southern city of Graz. Police did not publicly identify the suspect, but Austrian media cited unconfirmed reports as saying he was a former pupil.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon and Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
