Since March 21st, an estimated 400 schools across France have been hit by threats of attacks transmitted through its internal servers used for communications between teachers, pupils, and parents.
The messages—one video, of a beheading, had been sent to several people—had “entered our students’ personal accounts,” Minister for Education and Youth Nicole Belloubet told RMC. The minister said that she had asked for the messaging system “to be suspended in order to reinitialize the accounts and issue new instructions.”
Last Thursday, her ministry held a meeting on digital security in schools in order to devise a plan of action to improve the schools’ digital workspaces. “Together with representatives of elected representatives and publishers, we will institute a genuine digital shield,” Belloubet promised on X.
Belloubet said in an interview that the aim was to suspend the messaging system during spring break “for initial security work to be carried out, and to reopen afterward.” This work, she explained, was being carried out “in conjunction with local authorities, who have launched their own investigations.”
A 17-year-old was arrested and placed in police custody last Thursday in connection with the investigations. He was indicted on Saturday, and remains in custody, according to the Paris public prosecutor’s office.
Later this spring, two students will go on trial in Gironde and Landes, one for having made “death threats,” the other for “bogus bomb threats.”
The wave of threats comes on the heels of the high-profile resignation (for “safety reasons”) of the principal of the Maurice-Ravel school in Paris on March 22nd. The principal had received online death threats after asking a student to remove her Islamic headscarf while on school premises—in observance of French law that prohibits religious symbols worn in schools.
As The European Conservative has chronicled, French schools, its employees, and indeed its very curriculum, have become a favored target of Islamists.
Though Belloubet last Friday announced the nationwide deployment of a “mobile school security force” at the start of the academic year, able to be dispatched within 48 hours in the event of an “acute crisis,” she—together with the establishment media—avoids any mention of who exactly these schools need securing against.
