The mother of a student suspected of having attacked a school principal in Nice is under OQTF and had been followed for radicalization

The mother suspected of having attacked a school principal and a teacher in a nursery school in Nice (Alpes-Maritimes) on Monday, November 2, is subject to an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF) and had been monitored for Islamist radicalization until 2024, France Inter learned on Tuesday, November 3, from a source close to the investigation.

This 36-year-old woman, who declared having Tunisian and Italian nationalities, has already been sentenced in 2019 and 2023 for violence with weapons, a police source told France Inter. She is also known to territorial intelligence. According to information from France Inter, she was on S file until 2024 for Islamist radicalization and is still the subject of an OQTF. Expelled from French territory, she returned there several months ago. Since then, she has become particularly known for having been involved in illegal migrant smuggling networks at the Franco-Italian border and has been placed under house arrest.

Mother of two children attending this nursery school located near the center of Nice, the woman presented herself at the reception of the establishment on Monday around 9 a.m., asking to meet the director urgently. “According to the first elements received by the latter, the person concerned threatened her by pointing a gun in her direction and making accusations of sexual assault of which one of her children was allegedly the victim,” explained the public prosecutor of Nice, Damien Martinelli in a press release published Monday evening.

“She then slapped the director and then pulled her hair,” before putting the gun in her belt and slapping her again. “She took back her weapon and activated the trigger by pointing it in the direction of the latter, without a shot being fired, and specifying that she only had two bullets,” detailed the magistrate. “She then manipulated the weapon with which she struck the director again in the face” before taking out “a knife which she placed on her cheek before leaving the office about an hour after entering it.”

On her way out, the mother "came across a teacher to whom she made the same accusations. She slapped this teacher and pointed the gun in her direction after having fired it. She then left the establishment." Arrested shortly after at her home and placed in police custody, the woman declared that she had “dual Tunisian and Italian nationality” and “worked as a nursing assistant”. The investigation, opened in particular for attempted murder of a person responsible for a public service mission, was entrusted to the Nice judicial police.