RENNES, France – A 12-year-old student threatened a teacher with a knife in an apparent murder attempt at a French school on Wednesday, prosecutors said. This is the latest incident in the country’s increasingly strained education system.

No one was injured in the incident during an English class in the northwestern city of Rennes, but prosecutors said they had opened a criminal investigation into attempted murder.

The student, born in 2011, “came to class armed with a large knife with the obvious intention of killing her English teacher,” said Rennes prosecutor Philippe Astruc.

“During class, she swung the knife at the victim, who fled,” before the girl was disarmed by staff at Hautes Ourmes Middle School, he added.

“The shocked students were immediately brought to safety,” said the local school authority.

At a press conference, Astruc showed drawings of a kitchen knife that he said was 17 centimeters long.

The girl underwent a psychiatric examination at the hospital, which concluded that “the minor was ‘dangerous to herself’ and that her condition required treatment in a special environment,” Astruc said in a statement on Wednesday.

The prosecutor had previously stated that the “psychological or even psychiatric aspect” appeared to be “dominant” in the girl’s crime.

The suspect is the eldest of four children in a family of Mongolian origin residing in France and came to Rennes in 2012.

Tensions have been rising in schools in France, where there are large Muslim and Jewish communities, sometimes linked to the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

In October, a radicalized Islamist stabbed his former teacher to death in the northern city of Arras.

Earlier this week, teachers at a school outside Paris refused to work after a group of students objected to the display of a painting by Renaissance master Giuseppe Cesari depicting several naked women in class.

“IMMENSELY BRAVE”

Education Minister Gabriel Attal said he expressed his “full support” to the teacher and praised “the enormous courage and composure of the frontline staff who were able to respond to this threat.”

A young girl at the school told AFP on condition of anonymity that there was an argument between the student and the teacher, who allegedly confiscated her cellphone last Friday.

She said the student declared in front of her classmates that she would kill the teacher and act “like in Arras”, but “no one took her seriously”.

Separately, prosecutors in the Paris suburb of Créteil said on Wednesday they had opened an investigation into death threats based on “race, ethnicity, nationality or religion” after a man broke into a daycare center on Tuesday and threatened its director with a knife.

The man threatened her with rape and made anti-Semitic comments, prosecutors added.