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- A teacher who had shown his class controversial cartoons of the Orophet Muhammad was beheaded near a school in a Parisian suburb on Friday afternoon.
- President Emmanuel Macron has called the incident an “Islamist terrorist attack.”
- The man with the knife was an 18-year-old Moscow-born man who, according to witnesses, shouted “Allahu Akbar” while attacking the teacher with a large kitchen knife, then posted pictures of the murder on social media.
- The 47-year-old history teacher had shown his student the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo as part of a required course in “moral and civil education.”
- The attack comes just three weeks after two journalists were stabbed outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
A teacher who had shown his class highly controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was beheaded in a Parisian suburb on Friday afternoon, in what President Emmanuel Macron has called an “Islamist terrorist attack.”
French police shot dead an 18-year-old man who allegedly beheaded the teacher with a large kitchen knife near a school in a residential suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
According to a police source, witnesses had heard the knife shout “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) as it attacked the teacher, Reuters reported. He is also said to have shared photos of the attack on social media.
Visiting the scene shortly after the attack, Macron said the teacher was a “victim of an Islamist terrorist attack” killed because he “taught freedom of expression, to believe and not to believe,” according to Sky News.
“They will not win … We will act,” added the French president, the BBC reported.
The 18-year-old cutler, who has not been identified, was born in Moscow and is said to have Chechen roots, according to the Associated Press (AP). He fled after the attack, but was confronted by local police in the nearby Éragny area.
After the police ordered him to turn himself in, the cutler is said to have threatened them, prompting them to shoot him. The suspect, who had a negligible criminal record and was not known to the country’s intelligence service, died shortly thereafter.
Four people, including a minor, have also been arrested.
The 47-year-old history and geography teacher had shown his students, ages 12 to 14, cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that many Muslims found highly offensive.
The lessons were part of a compulsory course of “moral and civil education” that all French primary and secondary schools have in their curriculum.
The lesson prompted complaints from several parents. One family filed a legal complaint while another parent posted a YouTube video after the lesson complaining about the teacher.
In response, another parent wrote a comment below the video on Friday, defending the teacher.
“I am the parent of a student at this university. The teacher just showed Charlie Hebdo cartoons as part of a history lesson on freedom of expression. He asked Muslim students to leave the classroom if they wanted to, out of respect .. . a great teacher. He tried to foster the critical spirit of his students, always with respect and intelligence, “wrote the parents, according to The Guardian.
“Tonight, I am sad, for my daughter, but also for the teachers in France. Can we continue teaching without being afraid of being killed?” added the father. The video has now been removed.
France has suffered a wave of Islamist violence since the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in 2015 that left 12 people dead. A trial for the Islamist assault is currently underway in Paris.
Three weeks ago, two journalists from a production company were stabbed and seriously injured in front of the former offices of the satirical magazine.
Charlie Hebdo responded to Friday’s attack on your Twitter account, writing: “Intolerance has crossed a new threshold and does not seem to give ground to anything by imposing its terror on our country.”
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