By A 15-year-old boy has died after he was badly beaten in a town south of Paris, in the latest incident of school violence in France.
Thursday’s attack comes at a time of heightened tensions in French schools. Earlier this week a teenage girl was temporarily left in a coma after being beaten outside her school in Montpellier, in the south of the country. In that case, three alleged attackers have been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of a minor, one a girl from the same school.
In the latest incident, which occurred in the town of Viry-Châtillon, about 20km (12 miles) south of Paris, the teenager was attacked by several people as he left school on Thursday afternoon.
The public prosecutor’s office announced the boy’s death on Friday afternoon and said an investigation had been opened into murder and gang assault outside a school.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who was visiting a primary school in Paris on Friday morning, said: “We have a form of uninhibited violence among our teenagers and sometimes among increasingly younger ones. Schools needs to be shielded from this. School must remain a sanctuary for our children, for their families, for our teachers.”
“We will be intransigent against all forms of violence.”
The schoolboy went into cardiorespiratory arrest, a police source said. He was taken to Necker hospital in Paris.
The prosecutor Grégoire Dulin said in a statement that the attack on the teenage boy happened between 4pm and 4.30pm on Thursday. He said the 15-year-old was “violently attacked by several individuals” and “was discovered by a passerby badly injured in a road near his middle-school”.
The boy was taken to hospital and had emergency surgery on Thursday night, but the prosecutor said he had died on Friday afternoon. An autopsy will be carried out.
The assailants “tried to massacre him”, said Jean-Marie Vilain, the mayor of Viry-Châtillon, calling them “the worst kind of thugs”. “This extreme violence is becoming commonplace,” he added. Psychological help would be provided to pupils and teachers at the school, the mayor added.
According to a police source, the teenager was beaten by several people who then fled.
The school is in a working-class district of Viry-Châtillon, home to about 30,000 people. No arrests had been made by Thursday evening.
Dozens of messages threatening attacks have been sent to schools around France in recent days.
