The establishment had so far been spared by the wave of bomb threats that has been raging since the start of the school year in September throughout France. At noon on Thursday, the Léonard de Vinci comprehensive high school in Levallois-Perret, which has 1,700 students, had to be evacuated after a call to the police announced the explosion of a bomb. The evacuation was carried out quickly, in less than ten minutes, without difficulty, but after a few moments of hesitation since it was the alarm for intrusion alerts that was first triggered.
The surroundings of the establishment located on Avenue Georges-Pompidou, which will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in a few days, have been completely cordoned off by the national and municipal police as well as the soldiers of Operation Sentinelle present in Levallois on a daily basis since the passage of the Vigipirate plan to the emergency level of attack.
URGENT 🚨Leonardo da Vinci High School: pic.twitter.com/ewn3DgXDfM
— Agnès Pottier-Dumas (@AgnesPottierD) November 9, 2023
Classes were cancelled for the entire afternoon to allow time for the demining teams to inspect the facility from top to bottom, a total of 28,000 m². In the early afternoon, some students who had left their belongings in the classrooms were patiently patient, while those who arrived for the afternoon classes were forced to turn back.
Since the return from the All Saints' Day holidays last Monday, the department had not experienced any new bomb threats before this Thursday, marked by two anonymous calls announcing a bomb in the establishment: the alert to Leonardo da Vinci and another to Bagneux, at the Joliot-Curie college. But after the break in the school holidays, the bad series of bomb threats resumed at the beginning of the week in the Val-d'Oise, which had to evacuate seven middle and high schools last Tuesday, while on the same day, in the Val-de-Marne, all the high schools in Nogent had to be emptied of teachers and students to carry out the necessary removal of doubts.
Judicial investigations have been opened to try to trace the phone calls and identify those who made them.