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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.
France has witnessed a wave of Islamist violence since the 2015 terrorist attacks against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in the capital.
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. local time (1500 GMT) near the high school where the teacher worked in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a northwestern suburb about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the center of the city. French capital.
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.
‘Super nice, super friendly’
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.
“According to my son, he was super nice, super nice, super nice,” the mother, Nordine Chaouadi, told AFPTV.
The teacher “simply said to the Muslim children, ‘Go away, I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’ That’s what my son told me, ”said the father.
According to a judicial source, an identity card found on the attacker indicated that he was born in Moscow in 2002, although investigators were waiting for a formal identification.
Police said they were investigating a tweet posted from an account that featured a photo of the teacher’s head and which has since been closed.
It was unclear if the attacker had posted the message, which contained a threat against Macron, described as “the leader of the infidels,” they said.
‘Nothing ever happens here’
Residents in the generally quiet neighborhood said they were surprised when the school’s students, some accompanied by their parents, gathered on the street, checking their phones for updates.
“Nothing ever happens here,” said Mohand Amara, who lives nearby, as she walked her dog not far from the school.
“It saddens me, beheaded, that’s shocking,” said Virginie, 15, who used to be the student of the slain teacher and said she had “good memories” of him.
Police arrived at the scene after receiving a call about a suspicious individual loitering near the school, a police source said.
They discovered the dead man and soon saw the suspect, armed with a sword, who threatened them while they tried to arrest him.
They opened fire and seriously wounded him. The man later died from his injuries, a judicial source said.
‘Abominable’
The scene was cordoned off and a bomb disposal unit dispatched due to the alleged presence of an explosive vest, a police source said.
The French parliament suspended the debate on Friday after the news of the beheading, and the president of the session, Hugues Renson, visibly shaken, called the attack “abominable”.
MPs rose to their feet when Renson said that “on behalf of all of us, I want to honor the memory of the victim.”
Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer tweeted: “The Republic is under attack.”
The murder comes as security forces have been on high alert during the ongoing trial of alleged accomplices of attackers in the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which also saw a policewoman shot dead in the street. .
It also comes just days after a supporter of the Islamic State militant group who attacked a police officer with a hammer in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
And last month, charges were brought against a 25-year-old Pakistani man after he wounded two people with a butcher knife to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which allegedly led to the 2015 killings.
Seventeen people were killed in the three-day spree that heralded a wave of Islamist violence in France that has so far claimed more than 250 lives.
– AFP
