French pupil dies after being beaten near school

The boy was attacked near the school where he was a pupil

There are renewed concerns over levels of violence in French schools after two young teenagers were the victims of attacks, one of them fatal.

A 15-year-old boy named as Shamseddin died in hospital on Friday.

The news came a day after he was beaten by a group of youths near his school in Viry-Chatillon, in the southern Paris suburbs.

"This extreme violence is becoming commonplace," said the town mayor, Jean-Marie Vilain.

Mr Vilain told French media the boy was walking home after a music class at about 16:30 local time on Thursday when he was set upon by a group of youths.

According to witnesses, he was punched and kicked by the attackers, who were wearing balaclavas.

He was taken to the Necker hospital, a top paediatric hospital in Paris, but doctors were unable to save his life.

One 17-year-old teenager has been arrested by French police in the Viry-Chatillon murder case, the local prosecutor announced later. Police are still looking for other assailants.

On Tuesday, in another incident in the southern city of Montpellier, a 14-year-old girl named as Samara was placed in an artificial coma after she was beaten by a group shortly after leaving school.

Three adolescents - a girl and two boys of roughly the same age as Samara - have been arrested and admitted taking part in the attack, police said. Samara has since regained consciousness.

The girl's mother told French media that Samara had been bullied by another girl at the school because she refused to follow Islamic dress codes.

"Samara puts on a bit of make-up. And this other girl wears the headscarf. All the time, she kept calling her an unbeliever," she said on French television on Wednesday.

"My daughter dresses like a European. Every day there were insults. It was physically and psychologically unbearable."

However, the prosecutor's office in its initial report on the attack made no mention of a religious connection, saying the background was an argument over photographs shared on Snapchat.

And speaking Thursday evening on another French television channel, Samara's mother read out a statement accusing the far-right of trying to use the attack to their own advantage.

"My daughter is a practising pious Muslim. She fasts during Ramadan and prays five times a day. Please do not use us to sully the name of our religion," she said.

The attacks have further heightened concerns about violence in schools, against a background of gangs, cyber-bullying and pressure to conform to Islamic rules.

Last week, the headteacher of a school in Paris resigned saying he feared for his life after receiving death threats for telling a girl to remove her head covering in accordance with French law.

In the same week, several schools had to shut because of hoax bomb threats made by people claiming to be Islamic radicals.

In recent years, two teachers have been murdered by Islamist radicals.

Samuel Paty was decapitated on the street in a Paris suburb in 2020, while Dominique Bernard was killed at his school in Arras in October last year.

Earlier on Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron said schools needed to be "shielded" from "uninhibited violence among our teenagers and sometimes among increasingly younger ones".

Reacting to the two attacks, Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Rally said: "When will the government finally sit up and take the full measure of the savagery which is gnawing at our society?"

Jean-Marie Vilain, the mayor of Viry-Chatillon, was in tears as he spoke to journalists of the death of Shamseddin, who - he said - left a mother and a younger sister with their lives in ruins.

"We have to teach our children that there is good and there is bad. And when you do something bad, you get punished. And maybe we need to learn again how to punish," he said.