Man Claiming Allegiance to the Islamic State Stabs Schoolteacher in France

It emerged later that the teacher who said he had been stabbed had lied. Click here to read the updated story.

A hooded man claiming to be acting on behalf of the Islamic State (IS) stabbed the throat of a teacher in a school outside of Paris, French officials said on Monday.

French authorities said they are investigating the incident as an act of terrorism and are searching for the attacker, who fled the scene and remains at large.

The assailant said, "This is Daesh, it's a warning," as he slashed at the teacher's neck, according to eyewitness accounts told to the police. Daesh is an alternative word to refer to IS.

The male teacher, 45, was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

The attack, which took place in a state nursery school in Aubervilliers, comes almost exactly a month after gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in Paris in an attack claimed by IS.

Related: A French Psychiatrist Explains the Psychological Toll of the Paris Terror Attacks

IS recently denounced the state school system in a French-language publication, and urged readers to kill its teachers for promoting what the group called the evils of secular learning, music and drawing.

France's education minister and the head of the local government visited the premises of the school in Aubervilliers, in the Saint-Denis region just north of the capital. Classes at the school were cancelled.

Regional official Philippe Galli told reporters it was too early to draw conclusions about the character of the attack, noting that the assailant, wearing a balaclava, had apparently found a cutter and a pair of scissors at the school premises.

The incident also came days after a knifing in London's underground subway which police are treating as a terrorist attack.

IS is the militant Islamist group which controls swathes of Syria and Iraq and has vowed to attack France, a member of the coalition of countries conducting air strikes against it.

Related: Why the Islamic State Attacked Paris — And What Happens Next

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