France at Maximum Anti-Terror Alert State
After a 20-year-old Chechen native of Russia attacked school staff with a knife at the Gambetta secondary school in the French city of Arras on the morning of October 13th, resulting in the killing of a French language teacher and the injury of two others, a security guard and a cleaner, Prime Minister of France, Elizabeth Borne, has elevated the country to its maximum anti-terrorist alert state, according to Reuters.
The "attack emergency" level has been employed in previous counter-terrorism cases. This alert status can prompt increased security deployments and public warnings.
Additional security measures were taken after the Prime Minister's meeting with President Emmanuel Macron, who had previously visited the site of the tragedy, condemning the "barbarism of Islamist terrorism," and urging the French nation not to yield to terrorist pressure but to remain unified.
According to the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, there is no doubt regarding the connection between the Arras attack and the military aggression by Hamas in Israel; they are all links in the same chain.
Police reports indicate that the assailant, a former student of Gambetta school named Mohamed Mogoychkov, a 20-year-old citizen of Russia of Chechen origin, was under the surveillance of the security services as an individual suspected of ties to Islamic extremists. Mohamed's older brother is currently serving a prison sentence for connections with a network of Islamic militants in Europe, and Mohamed himself was on the state's list of individuals potentially posing a threat to national security.
The Minister of the Interior emphasized that the suspect had been monitored by intelligence agencies, and his phone had been tapped in the days leading up to the attack, but no indications of a planned act of terrorism had been uncovered.
In addition to Mohamed, the police have arrested several members of his family, including his younger brother, mother, sister, and uncle.
It's worth noting that the tragedy in Arras is far from the first instance of Islamist attacks in France. Three years ago, a similar incident occurred in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, where an 18-year-old Russian Muslim refugee killed and beheaded schoolteacher Samuel Paty. In November 2015, Islamist militants and suicide bombers attacked entertainment venues in Paris, resulting in the loss of 130 lives.