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PARIS – A French teacher who had recently shown students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was beheaded outside his school on Friday in what President Emmanuel Macron called an “Islamist terrorist attack.”
The assailant, whose identity has not been established, was shot by police as they tried to arrest him and later died of his injuries, police said.
The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) when the police confronted him, a scream often heard in jihadist attacks, a police source said.
French counterterrorism prosecutors said they were treating the assault as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization.”
The attack occurred on the outskirts of Paris around 5 p.m. near the secondary school where the teacher worked in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a northwestern suburb about 30 kilometers from the city center.
The killing bore the stamp of “an Islamist terrorist attack,” Macron said while visiting the scene.
Visibly moved, the president said that “the entire nation” was ready to defend the teachers and that “obscurantism will not win.”
Four people, including a minor, have been detained, a judicial source told AFP early Saturday morning. They were all related to the assailant, the source added.
The victim was a history teacher who recently showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on freedom of expression, police said.
A parent of a student at the school said the teacher may have caused “controversy” by asking Muslim students to leave the room before showing the cartoons.
The teacher “simply said to the Muslim children, ‘Go away, I don’t want your feelings to be hurt.’
