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Teacher in France Admits to Lying About Being Stabbed by Islamic State Attacker

A French schoolteacher who said he was stabbed by a man claiming allegiance to the Islamic State on Monday morning admitted that he fabricated the entire incident, hours after being taken to the hospital.
Photo by Michel Euler/AP

A French schoolteacher who said he was stabbed by a man claiming allegiance to the Islamic State on Monday morning admitted to making the entire incident up, hours after being taken to the hospital.

The Paris public prosecutor's office confirmed that the man admitted to investigators he had made up the attack, according to French daily Le Figaro. French television channel TF1 said the man admitted to stabbing himself in the head and throat, although it is not clear why he initially claimed it was an attack by the militant Islamist group.

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

Security authorities jumped into action soon after receiving the eyewitness report that a hooded assailant stabbed the nursery school teacher, saying, "This is Daesh, it's a warning." Daesh is an alternative word to refer to IS.

Related: French Islamic State Recruits Say They Would Like to Come Home

French officials said they were treating the incident as an act of terror and were searching for the supposed attacker, who the teacher said had fled the scene.

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, saying that the assailant, wearing a balaclava, had apparently found a box 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.

Watch VICE News' documentary What's Next For Paris?: France At War (Dispatch 4):