Pupil shoots and wounds teachers with hunting rifle in southern France

Pupil shoots and wounds teachers with hunting rifle in southern France

A French middle-school pupil shot and ‌wounded a head teacher and a female staff member with a hunting rifle at a school near Marseille on Monday, causing panic as children ran for cover, the local mayor and a student said. A supervisor at Joseph Lakanal ​college disarmed the 14-year-old before police arrived, Aubagne mayor Jean-Pierre Squillari told reporters. Both ​victims were hospitalised but neither suffered life-threatening injuries, he added. There was no immediate ⁠indication that the shooting was linked to a three-week wave of protests, some violent, that have rocked ​high schools across the country. President Emmanuel Macron condemned those incidents of violence on Monday. BFM TV said ​the 14-year-old pupil had entered the school with the rifle hidden in a guitar case. He was later detained by police. “It’s a kid who goes to that school. He entered with a rifle, the investigation will determine how, ​and fired twice in a corridor toward the principal and a teacher,” Squillari said. ‘We were panicking, we ran’ One student told Reuters that her maths teacher had played down the bang of the first gunshot ‌blast as ⁠noise from nearby construction works. A subsequent blast was followed by an alarm and classes emptied into the corridors. “We were panicking, we ran,” the student said. “There were two ways out: one passage to the sports hall and one passage to go outside. Survival instinct took over and I ran ​towards the outside.” Far-right leader ​Marine Le Pen, frontrunner ⁠in the race to replace Macron next spring, said the government was losing control of security in schools. “Schools, which should be sanctuaries, are now ​places where people risk their lives. Insecurity has entered the school. Many ​pupils and ⁠teachers go there with a knot in their stomach.” Macron’s education and interior ministers are due to travel to the college later in the day. Eddy Sid, spokesperson for the SGP-FO police union, told BFM TV there ⁠was ​no apparent link between the shooting and high-school protests against ​understaffing and lack of funding for schools. There had been no blockades at the Joseph Lakanal college, he added.