French pupil dies after being beaten near school

There are renewed issues over ranges of violence in French faculties after two younger youngsters had been the victims of assaults, one in every of them deadly.

A 15-year-old boy named as Shamseddin died in hospital on Friday.

The information got here a day after he was beaten by a bunch of youths near his school in Viry-Chatillon, within the southern Paris suburbs.

“This extreme violence is becoming commonplace,” stated the city mayor, Jean-Marie Vilain.

Mr Vilain advised French media the boy was strolling dwelling after a music class at about 16:30 native time on Thursday when he was set upon by a bunch of youths.

According to witnesses, he was punched and kicked by the attackers, who had been sporting balaclavas.

He was taken to the Necker hospital, a high paediatric hospital in Paris, however medical doctors had been unable to avoid wasting his life.

One 17-year-old teenager has been arrested by French police within the Viry-Chatillon homicide case, the native prosecutor introduced later. Police are nonetheless searching for different assailants.

On Tuesday, in one other incident within the southern metropolis of Montpellier, a 14-year-old woman named as Samara was positioned in a synthetic coma after she was beaten by a bunch shortly after leaving school.

Three adolescents – a lady and two boys of roughly the identical age as Samara – have been arrested and admitted collaborating within the assault, police stated. Samara has since regained consciousness.

The woman’s mom advised French media that Samara had been bullied by one other woman on the school as a result of she refused to comply with Islamic gown codes.

“Samara puts on a bit of make-up. And this other girl wears the headscarf. All the time, she kept calling her an unbeliever,” she stated on French tv on Wednesday.

“My daughter dresses like a European. Every day there were insults. It was physically and psychologically unbearable.”

However, the prosecutor’s workplace in its preliminary report on the assault made no point out of a non secular connection, saying the background was an argument over images shared on Snapchat.

And talking Thursday night on one other French tv channel, Samara’s mom learn out a press release accusing the far-right of making an attempt to make use of the assault to their very own benefit.

“My daughter is a practising pious Muslim. She fasts during Ramadan and prays five times a day. Please do not use us to sully the name of our religion,” she stated.

The assaults have additional heightened issues about violence in faculties, towards a background of gangs, cyber-bullying and strain to adapt to Islamic guidelines.

Last week, the headteacher of a school in Paris resigned saying he feared for his life after receiving demise threats for telling a lady to take away her head masking in accordance with French regulation.

In the identical week, a number of faculties needed to shut due to hoax bomb threats made by folks claiming to be Islamic radicals.

In current years, two lecturers have been murdered by Islamist radicals.

Samuel Paty was decapitated on the road in a Paris suburb in 2020, whereas Dominique Bernard was killed at his school in Arras in October final yr.

Earlier on Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron stated faculties wanted to be “shielded” from “uninhibited violence among our teenagers and sometimes among increasingly younger ones”.

Reacting to the 2 assaults, Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Rally stated: “When will the government finally sit up and take the full measure of the savagery which is gnawing at our society?”

Jean-Marie Vilain, the mayor of Viry-Chatillon, was in tears as he spoke to journalists of the demise of Shamseddin, who – he stated – left a mom and a youthful sister with their lives in ruins.

“We have to teach our children that there is good and there is bad. And when you do something bad, you get punished. And maybe we need to learn again how to punish,” he stated.