A 14-year-old girl has died of a heart attack in eastern France, an official said on Friday. A knife attacker slightly wounded two other girls and her school was placed on lockdown to protect itself from an attack, an official said Friday.

Education officer Olivier Faron said the teenager “was rescued by her teacher who quickly contacted the fire service. She died by the end of the afternoon”.

The girls’ secondary school in the village of Souffelweyersheim was closed after a man stabbed two other girls, aged 7 and 11, outside a nearby primary school on Thursday afternoon.

“Tragically, the student experienced a period of very high levels of stress that resulted in a heart attack,” Fallon said.

On Friday morning, a mother outside the secondary school said her son, who is in the first grade of junior high school, had also been scared during the previous day’s lockdown.

“In elementary school, they make it more like a game, but it’s probably a little too direct here,” Deborah Windling said.

“He thought there was an armed man in the school. They could hear doors slamming, but it was just other classrooms being cordoned off.”

Fallon defended the teachers.

“There’s no perfect solution,” he said.

But “we will analyze in depth what happened. If there are lessons to be learned from it, we will learn from it.”

The two girls injured in the attack were released from hospital on Thursday night with only minor injuries.

The prosecutor’s office said police had arrested the 30-year-old attacker and launched an investigation into the “attempted murder of a minor.”

It was unclear what his motive was, but he was “mentally fragile” and it did not appear to be a “terrorist act,” the statement said.

The incident follows a series of peer attacks on schoolchildren, notably the beating to death of 15-year-old Shemseddine outside Paris earlier this month.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced measures on Thursday to combat youth violence in and around schools.

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