A 14-year-old pupil allegedly shot his headmaster and a teacher in southern France after he was dumped by his girlfriend.
The French police have detained the boy suspected of opening fire on Monday, October 12, on his middle school principal and a teacher with a shotgun that he hid in a guitar case.
A staff member at the Joseph Lakanal middle school in Aubagne disarmed the boy after he fired multiple shots while roaming on two floors of the school, prosecutors said. Police then took him into custody.
Gun violence perpetrated by pupils in schools is rare in France.
Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said in a statement that the pupil fired once or twice on the first floor, wounding the principal and the teacher in the legs. They were hit with pellets used in 12-gauge shotguns, according to Marseille deputy prosecutor Audrey Jouaneton and police.
They were transported to a hospital with injuries that weren’t life threatening.
The boy’s motives were unknown, Jouaneton said.
“We still don’t have sufficiently precise evidence to say that he wanted to target the teaching staff — this principal and the teacher — but they were in any case hit by the shots,” she said.
The boy then went to the second floor and opened fire again, twice — the first at the floor in front of a teacher and the second in a classroom, hitting the teaching board. The shots didn’t hit any teachers or the pupils in the classroom, but they were “very shocked,” Bessone said.
The boy was then intercepted by a staff member in a stairwell, with what Jouaneton praised as “extreme courage.”
In a post on X, French President Emmanuel Macron praised the staff’s “composure and exemplary response,” saying they “prevented an even worse outcome.”
Mental health counseling was offered to pupils.
There was no immediate information to suggest that the shooting was in any way connected to protests by high school pupils demanding better-resourced schools that have been shaking France for several weeks.
The middle school wasn’t impacted on Monday by the protests, police said.
On X, Education Minister Édouard Geffray posted that “this unacceptable act once again highlights the rise of unbridled violence in our society, against which we must all mobilize. In words as well as deeds.”