A French-Jewish teenager  has been violently assaulted in what has been described as  “a heinous antisemitic attack.”

The 15-year-old girl  had been wearing her Jewish school uniform when she was set upon in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles last week, and slashed across the face.

She was able to walk home arriving, “bleeding and shocked” according to reports, before reporting the incident to the police.

In a statement François Pupponi, a lawmaker in the lower house of France’s parliament and a former mayor of Sarcelles, labelled the incident “heinous”.

He wrote: ““I have no doubt the perpetrators of this attack had antisemitic motives.

“Faced with these acts, we need to abandon pretence and naivety. In Sarcelles, everybody knows who is a practising Jew according to the way they dress.

“Delinquents know it too. When someone slashes a young girl’s face with a utility knife, when she is wearing clothes favoured by many women from the Jewish community, then there is no room for doubt.”

The girl claimed her attacker had run away immediately after the assault. She claimed she did not see the attacker’s face and did not hear anything said during the attack, which happened last Wednesday.

Two kosher shops in Creteil, another suburb of Paris, were torched in separate incidents last week.