crime
Bomb threats continue to keep France on tenterhooks
The hearse carrying the coffin of the killed French teacher follows a police escort. photo
© Michel Spingler/AP/dpa
Highest terror alert level: Regional airports were temporarily evacuated on Thursday, as on the previous day, due to bomb threats. And President Macron attended the memorial service for a slain teacher.
As the newspaper “La Voix du Nord” reported, there was also a government plane belonging to President Emmanuel Macron at Lille airport during the lockdown. In nearby Arras, Macron attended the memorial service for the teacher killed by an Islamist attacker last Friday.
The funeral service in Arras Cathedral was broadcast on a screen in the town hall square, where hundreds of people paid their last respects to the 57-year-old educator and laid flowers. The teacher confronted the attacker with other school employees, who were injured in the process, and thus probably prevented anything worse from happening.
The 20-year-old knife attacker claimed responsibility for the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia and expressed his hatred of France, the French and democracy in an audio message. After the attack, France imposed the highest terror alert level and mobilized 7,000 soldiers from the anti-terror unit “Sentinelle”.
So far, the police have not been able to find anything suspicious after any of the dozens of bomb threats in France, which mainly affect schools. The police attributed a threat to a school in the Paris area to four young people, including an eleven- and a twelve-year-old student, as the newspaper “Le Parisien” reported. It is not known who is behind the threats, which also affected the Louvre in Paris and the Palace of Versailles on several occasions.