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PARIS (REUTERS) – Samuel Paty, the beheaded teacher outside his school in a Paris suburb, was described by his students and parents as loving and professional. But he was assassinated after becoming the target of an angry campaign on social media.
Paty, 47, was killed Friday by an 18-year-old man of Chechen origin. Prosecutors said the attacker, shot and killed by police shortly after, wanted to punish the teacher for showing his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class on free speech earlier this month.
The parents said they were baffled at how the civics class could have become the motive for a gruesome murder.
Prosecutors offered a clue on Saturday (October 17) when they said they detained two men, one the father of a student at school and another on the intelligence services radar, who said they had used social media to give turn a dispute over class citizenship in a campaign against the teacher.
“I can’t imagine how we got to this point,” said Cécile Ribet Retel, a member of the school’s parents’ association, College du Bois d’Aulne.
“This raises questions about the role of social media.”
Paty had also shown the cartoons to her students last year, as part of the civics curriculum, according to a 13-year-old in that class.
The student, speaking with her mother, said that no one had made a fuss over the class last year. The teacher, he added, was “very funny.”
“He was telling jokes. He was very involved in the lessons.”
ONLINE CAMPAIGN
The first sign of a problem with the civics lesson of the year came on October 7 when the father of a girl in the class posted an angry video on Facebook. In it, he said that the teacher had shown the cartoons of Mohammad and that his daughter, a Muslim, had been disciplined for expressing her displeasure.
The man, not named by authorities, said he wanted the teacher removed.
The next day, the father went to see the school principal to complain, prosecutors said. That night, he posted another video on Facebook, giving the teacher’s name and identifying the school.
On October 12, another video appeared on YouTube, featuring the student’s father. An off-camera man interviewed the man’s daughter. The off-camera voice said President Emmanuel Macron was inciting hatred of Muslims and threatened a demonstration if the teacher was not removed.
The off-camera man was known to intelligence services, counter-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said on Saturday, although he did not say in what capacity. The student’s father has a half-sister who in 2014 joined the Islamic State in Syria, Ricard said.
Both men were detained by the police after Paty’s murder.
THREATS TO THE SCHOOL
School personnel attempted to resolve the dispute. The principal arranged a meeting with parents unhappy with the civics lesson. The father who posted the Facebook video did not attend, prosecutors said.
“It went well,” Nordine Chaouadi, who had a son in Paty’s class, said of the meeting. “My wife participated in it. She said it was a man who was wrong, it happens to everyone. You don’t have to go through all that agitation on social networks.”
By Tuesday of this week, the principal had managed to calm the atmosphere at the school, according to a local official briefed on what happened, who did not want to be identified.
By then, however, the problem had escalated.
According to prosecutors, the school had been receiving threats since the videos began to appear on social media.
On Saturday, the day after the teacher’s murder, the students and parents laid flowers on the doors of the school.
Chahinez Senouci, who has a son at school, said he used to run into Paty at school meetings.
“He was a teacher who liked the students, he was very attentive. He was careful that they were following everything correctly, ”he said. “It’s a huge shock.”
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