French authorities say teacher fabricated story about being attacked by terrorist
Police officers patrol near a preschool in Aubervilliers, France, on Monday after a teacher reported that being attacked by a masked assailant with a box cutter or knife yelling about Islamic State.
When a French nursery school teacher said he had been stabbed Monday by a man claiming to be acting in the name of Islamic State, authorities here reacted swiftly.
Police and government officials raced to the scene; classes were suspended and heightened security measures promised.
Now the entire incident appears to have been a fabrication.
In the evening, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced that the teacher had admitted that he invented the attack.
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The incident came at a particularly sanative time in France, which is still reeling from a deadly assault by Islamic State extremists last month. The country has been under a state of emergency since gunmen wearing suicide vests attacked restaurants and cafes, a soccer stadium and a packed concert hall in Paris on Nov. 13.
The teacher, who was treated at a hospital for light wounds including to the neck, had claimed that he was attacked about 7:30 a.m. as he was preparing for class at a school in Aubervilliers, just north of Paris, French news reports said.
The teacher told investigators that a man wearing a balaclava and white overalls had stabbed him using a knife or box cutter he found in the classroom.
“This is Daesh,” the teacher quoted the purported assailant as saying, using the Arabic acronym for the extremist group. “This is a warning.”
Authorities took the claim seriously, in part because Islamic State’s French-language magazine Dar al-Islam recently called on its followers to kill teachers in the secular French education system.
Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem rushed to the site and pledged that the government would continue to strengthen security measures in schools. Local government officials also arrived. The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a terrorism investigation.
But after interviewing the teacher in hospital, investigators concluded his tale was bogus.
It was not immediately clear what might have motivated his claim or whether charges would be brought against the teacher.
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