14-year-old arrested after shooting at French middle school injures two teachers

On a Monday morning in Aubagne, a small city eleven miles east of Marseille, a fourteen-year-old student walked into Lakanal middle school carrying a shotgun concealed inside a guitar case. What followed was a sequence of violence that lasted minutes but would reshape the day for everyone inside the building.

The boy entered the school and opened fire. The principal, fifty-three years old, was shot in the leg and lower back. A thirty-seven-year-old teacher was hit in the thigh. A third person sustained minor injuries. The shooting happened on the first floor, in the hallways where staff and students move between classes. A member of the school staff managed to restrain the boy before he could continue. He was taken into police custody at the scene.

But the incident did not end with those first shots. The boy had moved to the second floor, where he fired twice more. The first shot went toward the floor in front of a teacher. The second entered an occupied classroom and struck the chalkboard. Neither that teacher nor any of the students in the room were hit, though the Marseille prosecutor later noted they were severely shaken by what they witnessed. No children were harmed in the attack, according to Aubagne Mayor Jean-Pierre Squillari. The injuries sustained by the two teachers were not life-threatening.

Students described the chaos of those moments. Two pupils told French media they heard a fire alarm and headed for the stairs to evacuate. Instead, they came face-to-face with the shooter a meter away, holding his hunting rifle. He fired at the ground near them. They ran, and he followed for a distance before they managed to escape. "We started screaming," one of them recalled. Most students saw little of what happened—the violence was concentrated in hallways and one classroom—but the psychological weight of the incident spread through the entire school. The mayor said many students were distressed, and a psychological support unit was set up on site to provide immediate care.

The investigation moved quickly beyond the school walls. The Marseille prosecutor's office opened a case for attempted murder. Police searched the family home, where they found weapons. The boy's father was taken into custody, and French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez later confirmed that both parents had been detained. Local media reported, citing police sources, that the shooting was not believed to be connected to ongoing protests over school conditions, though the exact motive remained unclear. The mayor mentioned that the boy's father had requested a meeting with the school's educational advisor, but offered no further detail about what prompted the request or what might have led to Monday's violence.

President Emmanuel Macron issued a statement expressing "full solidarity and total support" for the teachers, students, and parents affected. He praised the school staff for their composure and response, saying their actions "made it possible to avoid the worst." Education Minister Édouard Geffray called the shooting "unacceptable" and described it as evidence of "the rise of unchecked violence in our society." The school remained closed to students on Tuesday as the community absorbed what had happened and began the work of processing trauma that would extend far beyond the immediate injuries.