Pupil shoots and wounds two teachers in France

A French middle-school pupil shot and wounded a head teacher and a ​female staff member with a hunting rifle at a school near Marseille on Monday, causing panic as children ran for cover, the local mayor and a student said.A supervisor at Joseph Lakanal college disarmed the 14-year-old before police arrived, Aubagne mayor ​Jean-Pierre Squillari told reporters. Both victims were hospitalised but neither suffered life-threatening injuries, he added.There was no immediate indication that the shooting ⁠was linked to a three-week wave of protests, some violent, at high schools across ‌the ‌country. ​French president Emmanuel Macron condemned those incidents of violence on Monday.BFM TV said the pupil entered the school with the rifle hidden in a ⁠guitar case. He was later detained ​by police.READ MORE“It’s a kid who goes to that school. ​He entered with a rifle, the investigation will determine how, and fired twice in a corridor toward the ‌principal and a teacher,” Squillari said.One student said her maths teacher had played down the bang ⁠of the first gunshot blast as noise ⁠from nearby construction works. ​A subsequent blast was followed by an alarm and classes emptied into the corridors.“We were panicking, we ran,” the student said. “There were two ways out: one passage to the sports hall and one passage to go outside. Survival instinct took over and I ran towards the outside.”Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, front-runner in the race to replace Macron next spring, said the government was losing control of security in schools.“Schools, which should be sanctuaries, are now ‌places where people risk their ⁠lives. Insecurity has entered the school. Many pupils and teachers go there with a knot in their stomach.”Macron’s education and interior ministers are due to travel to the ‌college later in the day.Eddy Sid, spokesperson for the SGP-FO police union, told BFM TV there was no apparent link ​between the shooting and high-school protests against understaffing and lack of funding for ​schools.There had been no blockades at the Joseph Lakanal college, he added. – Reuters