"The nation is in shock." After the attack on Thursday morning in Annecy, Emmanuel Macron spoke on Twitter to denounce the horror of the facts. According to the latest assessment, six people were injured, including four children, the prognosis being life-threatening for two children and an adult. The attacker was arrested by the police. He had identity papers stating that he was a Syrian national, was unknown to police records and had refugee status.
In France, it is rare for children to be targeted by attacks, whether terrorist or not. However, France has not been spared by the horror. On March 19, 2012, an attack took place at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish High School in Toulouse. Terrorist Mohammed Merah kills four people, including three young children. Myriam Monsonégo, a 7-year-old girl, is shot at point-blank range in the schoolyard by the killer "on a scooter" after the latter murdered the young rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two sons, Gabriel, 3, and Arié, 6, at the door of the establishment. During the attack, the killer seriously wounded 15-and-a-half-year-old Aaron "Bryan" Bijaoui, who was hospitalized for nearly a month. The assailant was killed during a raid operation a few days later.
The trauma of Neuilly, in 1993
Apart from this anti-Semitic attack, we also remember the hostage-taking of the kindergarten of Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine) in May 1993, just thirty years ago. This hostage-taking was the work of Érick Schmitt, a 42-year-old former entrepreneur who had experienced prosperous years and then the bitter taste of bankruptcy. Unemployed, depressed, in a desperate act, he had fomented this delirious terrorist project before being shot dead by the police.
But recent events show that in other countries children are not spared these macabre scenarios. On April 5, a nursery in southern Brazil was the scene of scenes of horror when a 25-year-old man burst in and killed four children with an axe. Attacks on schools have increased in Brazil in recent years. Last November, a 16-year-old boy also killed four people at two schools in Aracruz, in the southeastern state of Espirito Santo.
In the United States, this kind of event is unfortunately very common and has been sadly in the news for thirty years. Just last March, three children and three adults were shot dead at an elementary school in Nashville, in the south of the United States. The school, according to its website, welcomed some 210 students from kindergarten to sixth grade, surrounded by about forty adults. A tragedy reminiscent of the last precedent dating back to 2022. An 18-year-old man opened fire Tuesday at a school in Ulvade, Texas, killing 19 young students and two adults. The perpetrator of the massacre had been shot dead by the police.
Sandy Hook to Beslan
"Mass shootings" were added to a litany of terrible massacres ranging from the attack on the high school in Columbine, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, which killed 12 students and a teacher, and injured more or less seriously 24 other students, to the deadly attack on the Sandy Hook school on December 14, 2012, which killed 26 people, including 20 children aged 7 and under, or the Parkland shooting on February 14, 2018, where 17 people died. These killings regularly fuel the debate on gun control in the United States.
At the height of the horror, history also remembers the hostage-taking in Beslan. About a thousand children and adults are taken hostage in school number 1 in this small town in North Ossetia (Russian Federation) as part of the second Chechen war. On 3 September 2004, after three days of siege, an explosion in the school - the origin of which is still unclear - and an intervention by Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, caused a panic movement among the children, on whom the hostage-takers fired at the same time as on the Russian commandos. According to official figures, 334 civilians were killed, including 186 children.