Terrified schoolgirl, 14, suffers a fatal heart attack when her school goes into lockdown to protect against a knife attacker who stabbed two younger children nearby

A 14-year-old girl has died of a heart attack in eastern France after her school was closed to protect herself from a knife attacker.

The man slightly injured two other girls in the attack on Thursday, but amid the chaos – in which students were terrified by the sound of slamming doors – the teenager suffered a heart attack and was later pronounced dead, it was revealed today.

The girl ‘was saved by teachers who very quickly called the fire brigade. She died in the late afternoon,” education official Olivier Faron said.

Her high school in the village of Souffelweyersheim closed its doors on Thursday afternoon after a man stabbed two other girls, aged 7 and 11, outside a nearby primary school.

Faron said the teen who died during the attack “unfortunately … suffered an episode of very high stress that led to a heart attack.”

A mother outside the high school said Friday morning that her son in his first year of high school had also been scared the day before during the lockdown.

“Where in primary school they made it more like a game, here it was maybe a little too direct,” Deborah Wendling said.

“He thought there was an armed person in the school. They heard doors slamming, but in fact it was just other classrooms being locked.”

Faron defended the teachers.

“There is no perfect solution,” he said. But ‘we will analyze in depth what happened. If we can learn lessons from this, we will learn them.’

The two girls injured in the attack were released from hospital with only minor injuries on Thursday evening.

Police have arrested the 30-year-old attacker and an investigation has been opened into “attempted murder of minors,” the prosecutor’s office said.

It was not immediately clear what motivated him, but he was “mentally vulnerable” and it did not appear to be “an act of terrorism,” the report said.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced measures on Thursday to tackle violence among teenagers in and around schools.

The incident follows a series of attacks on schoolchildren by their peers, most notably the fatal assault earlier this month of Shemseddine, 15, outside Paris.

France, which introduced its ban on religious clothing in schools two decades ago in an effort to preserve secular tradition, remains steadfast in its efforts to enforce the ban while protecting teachers and children.

Mr Attal said last month that the country had raised its security alert to the highest level after the Moscow concert hall attack.

The girl ‘was saved by teachers who very quickly called the fire brigade. She died in the late afternoon,” education official Olivier Faron said

Parents pick up their children under the supervision of police and firefighters at a school in the eastern French city of Souffelweyersheim after two girls were injured in a knife attack outside the school on April 18, 2024

ISIS on March 22 claimed responsibility for the atrocity, in which armed men stormed a public event and shot indiscriminately at civilians with automatic weapons, killing at least 143 people.

Up to 45,000 French police and gendarmes will now be deployed every day during the Olympics this summer, while 18,000 troops are also expected to be mobilized, according to government figures.

Another 18,000 to 22,000 private security guards will be on site for the Games, which take place from July 26 to August 11.

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