Knife-wielding man is bundled to floor by police at French kosher market

A knife-wielding man has today been arrested by French police after being seen outside a Jewish school and a kosher market where pupils buy their lunch.

Security guards at the Yavne school in Marseille spotted the man brandishing the weapon on Friday and alerted police, who tackled him to the ground as he tried to enter the nearby market.

The children were all kept inside the school while officers searched the area for explosives or any accomplices, and no one was injured, a Marseille police spokeswoman said.

One witness claimed the man was also armed with a tear gas canister.  

Police bundled the suspect to the ground (left) in Marseille on Friday before escorting him away in handcuffs (right). The man’s motives remain unclear

His car was towed away and the spokeswoman added the man’s motives remained unclear on Friday. 

One witness said police responded very quickly and described the area as a gathering place for people in the local Jewish community.

The witness, who asked only to be identified by his first name, Laurent, said: ‘When the students get out of school they buy sandwiches here, buy meals for the sabbath, and a lot of parents from the school get their coffee and croissants there and drink it outside.

‘He saw this gathering of people.’ 

Police guard the Jewish school in Marseille. Security guards spotted a man brandishing a knife outside the Yavne school.

The man then tried to entered a kosher market before he was bundled to the ground by police

It comes just months after France’s ‘most wanted woman’ whose husband killed five people as part of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks was sentenced to 30 years in jail on terrorism charges. 

Police patrol the streets of Marseille following the incident on Friday. One witness said ‘it was a rapid police operation’.

The suspect’s car was towed away as he was arrested by police. The area is popular among students and parents from the school

Pictured: Windows of the suspect’s car appear to have been smashed as it is towed away

 Hayat Boumeddiene, wife of jihadi gunman Amedy Coulibaly, was among 14 people found guilty over the joint attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in January that year.

Boumeddiene, a member of ISIS who is now thought to be in Syria, was found guilty in absentia of financing terrorism and belonging to a criminal terrorist network.  

Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi opened fire in the offices of Charlie Hebdo killing 12 as ‘revenge’ for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

Twenty four hours later, Coulibaly – who was friends with the Kouachi brothers – launched his own attack targeting Paris’s Jewish community. 

After failing to attack his planned target – a Jewish community centre in the suburb of Montrouge - Coulibaly shot and killed policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe, 26.

He then stormed a Kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes where he shot another four dead and took 20 hostages.

In 2012, an attack left seven people dead, including three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse.  

Boumeddiene was the wife of Amedy Coulibaly (together left, and right), who opened fire on a Jewish supermarket 24 hours after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, killing five