A man armed with a knife tried to enter a kosher grocery store near a Jewish school in the city of Marseille on Friday morning, before being overpowered by security guards and arrested by the police.
The man was first spotted by security guards at the Jewish college Yavne in the city, stepping out of a vehicle with a knife. Media reports said he had a piece of cloth, possibly a towel, wrapped around his head.
Initially, it was reported that the man, presumably in his 60s, tried to enter school. Police later said he made no attempt to enter the school, but was noticed by security guards with suspicious behavior. They then followed him as he tried to enter the kosher store and dropped him on the floor.
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“The attention of school security personnel has been drawn to the individual’s suspicious behavior on the street,” said a police statement.
The children were kidnapped inside the school while the police were looking for explosives or accomplices, a police spokeswoman said. No one was injured in the incident and the man’s motives remain unclear, she said.
“The man was immobilized until the arrival of [police],” she said.
Police towed the suspect’s car and isolated the area. Local police stepped up security around Jewish sites in the city after the incident.
Police officers cordon off the area after a man visibly brandished a knife in front of a Jewish school and a kosher market in Marseille, southern France, Friday, March 5, 2021 (AP Photo / Daniel Cole)
A witness said it was a quick police operation and described the area as a meeting place for people in the local Jewish community.
“When students leave school they buy sandwiches here, they buy food for Saturday, and many parents at school get their coffee and croissants there and drink outside … He saw this gathering of people,” the witness, who asked only to be identified by his first name, Laurent, he told the Associated Press.
The head of the Jewish Agency, Isaac Herzog, said the incident was “a warning sign for anti-Semitism bubbling up under the surface”.
Archive: Jewish Agency President Isaac Herzog speaks during the main ceremony of the March of the Living, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, May 2, 2019. (Screenshot from the March of the Living feed. )
“Anti-Semitism and the danger to the lives of Jews did not end with the coronavirus pandemic,” he said. The hatred was “just waiting to explode when the crisis is over”.
The year 2020 saw several jihadist attacks against Jews in France, including an attack stabbed in Nice in October, which left three dead; the beheading in October of the history professor, Samuel Paty, in the Paris suburbs, after he showed students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression; and the stabbing of two people outside the former headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Jews were the target of several attacks, including the murders of Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll in 2017 and 2018.
In January 2015, four Jews were murdered during an attack on the Hyper Cacher market in Paris, as part of three days of attacks in which 17 people were killed, starting with the massacre of 12 people at Charlie Hebdo following the publication of the controversial Prophet Mohammed cartoon.
Police officers remove a suspect’s car after a man visibly brandishes a knife in front of a Jewish school and a kosher market in Marseille, southern France, Friday, March 5, 2021 (AP Photo / Daniel Cole)
Marseille witnessed several stab attacks on Jewish men in 2015-2016, in which five were injured.
In 2012, Mohammed Merah was involved in a murder spree that left seven people dead in the south of France, including three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
