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French police were questioning nine people in custody on October 17 after a man beheaded a school teacher on a street in a Paris suburb, police sources said.
Police said the victim was 47-year-old history and geography professor Samuel Paty, who recently showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on freedom of expression.
The man suspected of beheading Paty was an 18-year-old Moscow-born man from Russia’s southern Chechnya region, French media reported.
French law enforcement sources said the nine suspects arrested included the attacker’s grandparents and 17-year-old brother. Police shot the attacker while trying to arrest him and later died of his injuries, police said.
There was no prior indication that it was a potential radical, a source close to the investigation said AFP.
Chechnya is a region in Russia’s North Caucasus that has been rocked by two separatist wars and an Islamist insurgency since the 1990s.
French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the October 16 incident as “an” Islamist terrorist attack.
“One of our compatriots was killed today because he taught … freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not to believe,” Macron said at the scene hours after the incident.
The French counterterrorism prosecutor opened a murder investigation on an alleged terrorist motive, the prosecutor’s office said.
The alleged attacker was reportedly seen holding a knife a short distance from the scene of the attack. When confronted by police, the attacker shouted: “Allahu akbar,” which in Arabic means “God is the greatest,” a cry often heard in jihadist attacks, AFP said, citing a police source.
The attack occurred in Conflans Saint-Honorine around 5 p.m. on October 16 near the high school where the victim was teaching history.
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.
In the National Assembly, the French parliament, deputies honored the teacher and condemned the “heinous terrorist attack.”
France has witnessed a series of violent attacks carried out by Islamist militants in recent years. It has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, some of them ethnic Chechen who have been offered asylum.
