Gunfire shattered the routine of a school day near Marseille when a 14-year-old student opened fire with a hunting rifle, wounding a headteacher and a female staff member and sending pupils scrambling for safety, according to the local mayor and a student.
A supervisor at Joseph Lakanal college managed to disarm the boy before police arrived, Aubagne mayor Jean-Pierre Squillari told reporters.
Both victims were taken to hospital, and neither injury was considered life-threatening, he said.
Authorities said there was no immediate sign the shooting was connected to a three-week wave of protests — some of them violent — that has shaken high schools around the country. French President Emmanuel Macron has condemned those incidents of violence.
BFM TV reported that the teenager brought the rifle into the school concealed inside a guitar case.
Police later took him into custody.
“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,” Mr Squillari said.
Emergency vehicles parked in front of Joseph-Lakanal college
‘We were panicking, we ran’
One student said confusion followed the first shot, with her maths teacher initially dismissing the loud bang as construction noise from nearby works.
After a second blast, an alarm sounded and students poured out of classrooms into the corridors, she said.
“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, who is the frontrunner in the race to replace Mr Macron next spring, said the government was failing to keep schools secure.
“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.”
Mr Macron’s education and interior ministers are expected to travel to the college later in the day.
Eddy Sid, a spokesperson for the SGP-FO police union, told BFMTV that investigators saw no obvious link between the shooting and high-school protests over understaffing and insufficient funding.
He added that there had been no blockades at the Joseph Lakanal college.
