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“Terrorists will not be able to divide French society, obscurantism will not win,” French President Emmanuel Macron said of the murder of a history professor in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorine.
A knife attack in Paris beheaded a teacher showing Muhammad cartoons in class
Macron called the attack Islamist terrorism and an attack on the republic, Reuters reported.
“Today, a citizen was murdered because he was a teacher and because he was teaching freedom of expression,” said the president, who stood near the school where the victim taught and where he was attacked with a knife. The French leader said that all of France was behind their teachers.
Four people, including a minor, were detained from Friday night to Saturday. following the murder in France of a history professor, AFP reported, citing a judicial source. The detainees are relatives of the attacker, who was killed by the police.
The attack, classified as an act of terrorism, took place in the Parisian suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorine, near the school where the victim taught. It is not clear if the attacker had any relationship with the teacher and if he had accomplices.
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According to French media, citing a judicial source, the attack was committed by an 18-year-old Chechen man., born in Moscow, lived in France. It is alleged that his identity document was found.
These data have not been officially confirmed, but the Association of Chechens residing in Europe issued a statement condemning the attack and stating that it does not accept any form of religious extremism and acts of violence, TASS reported. No community can be held responsible for the individual actions of its compatriots, the organization stressed, and called on politicians and the media to refrain from making statements that could harm the Chechen community.
After the Russian army’s war in Chechnya against Islamist separatists in the late 1990s and early 2000s, France gave refuge to many Chechens, the Associated Press reported. In recent months, there have been cases of violence in Chechen communities in France: in the Dijon region, in Nice and in the western city of Saint-Dizier. These cases are believed to be related to local criminal circles.
They found bodies of dead children in Paris
Investigators in the murder of the French history professor are investigating a report, uploaded to the social network Twitter from an account that is already closed and in which there was a photo of the victim’s head, AFP reported.
Investigators are trying to determine if the photo was uploaded by the teacher’s attacker or by someone else. Below the photo in question was a threatening message addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In it he is called the “leader of the unbelievers.” The author of the message also assured that he wanted revenge on whoever dared to humiliate the prophet Muhammad.
The residents of Conflan-Saint-Honorine are still unable to recover from the shock of the master’s murder. Today, the journalists spoke with some passersby who remember that the area is calm and nothing ever happens in it.
Rodrigo Arenas, co-president of the largest French association of parents of pupils, said that a week ago he received a signal for an extremely nervous father of a pupil of the teacher who was killed for displaying a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in the classroom. Before showing the cartoon, the teacher invited Muslim students out of the classroom because he feared that some might be affected by what they saw. The cartoon showed a squatting prophet with a star painted on his back. The drawing was accompanied by the text “A star is born”.
What happened generated controversy among the parents of the students. There was also a parent meeting of the affected parents of the students in the teacher’s class. The teacher and the school principal participated in the meeting, Reuters added. The meeting went well, there was no yelling, no one attacked anyone, say the parents who attended.
According to a student’s mother, the teacher had made a mistake, something that happened to everyone. But a Muslim father posted a video on social media, which was shared by a mosque in Paris. In it, the father called the teacher a “criminal” and added that he should no longer stay in the national education system and teach the children, but must take a training course on his own.
