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French CRS police officers stand as adults and children gather in front of flowers displayed at the entrance to a secondary school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, 30 kilometers northwest of Paris, on October 17, 2020, after of an attacker beheading a teacher.
- French police arrested nine people after a suspect beheaded a school teacher in broad daylight in Paris.
- Police shot dead the attacker minutes after he murdered the 47-year-old history teacher.
- The murder was described by French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday as a “terrorist attack.”
French police arrested nine people after a suspect beheaded a school teacher in broad daylight on the street in a Paris suburb on Friday, police sources said.
Samuel Paty, who had recently shown students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, was beheaded outside his school.
Police shot dead the attacker minutes after he murdered the 47-year-old history teacher.
Paty had shown her students cartoons of the prophet earlier this month in a civics class on freedom of speech, which angered several Muslim parents.
Muslims believe that any description of the prophet is blasphemous.
The murder was described by French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday as a “terrorist attack.”
Prime Minister Jean Castex said: “I want to share with you my utter outrage. Secularism, the backbone of the French Republic, was the target of this vile act. “
Four relatives of the attacker, including a minor, were detained immediately after the attack in the middle-class suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Five more were detained overnight, including two parents of students from the College du Bois d’Aulne, where the teacher worked.
‘Barbarism’
The parents of the students placed flowers at the door of the school. Some said their children were distraught.
“[My daughter] he is in pieces, terrified by the violence of such an act. How am I going to explain the unthinkable? a father wrote on Twitter.
Muslim leaders condemned the murder, which many public figures perceived as an attack on the essence of the French state and its values of secularism, freedom of worship, and freedom of expression.
Tareq Oubrou, the imam of a Bordeaux mosque, said of the murder: “It is not a civilization that kills an innocent person, it is barbarism.”
“Every day that passes without incident we give thanks,” he said. “We are between the hammer and the anvil. It attacks the republic, society, peace and the very essence of religion, which is about union. “
In recent years, France has witnessed a series of violent attacks, including bombings and shootings in November 2015 at the Bataclan theater and in locations in Paris that killed 130 people.
At the end of last month, a man, who emigrated to France from Pakistan, used a butcher knife to attack and injure two people in front of the former offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
That was the place where gunmen shot and killed magazine employees five years ago in retaliation for the publication of cartoons of the prophet in the magazine.
The issue of cartoons was revived last month when Charlie Hebdo decided to republish them to coincide with the start of the trial of accomplices in the 2015 attack.
