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Paris, October 17
A man stabbed to death a French high school history teacher who had shown his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Muslims consider blasphemous, French officials said on Friday.
The attacker was shot dead by a police patrol a few blocks from the scene of the attack late Friday afternoon, in a residential suburb northwest of Paris.
“One of our fellow citizens was killed today because he was teaching, he was teaching students about freedom of expression,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters at the scene of the attack.
“Our compatriot was flagrantly attacked, he was the victim of an Islamist terrorist attack,” Macron said.
The incident had echoes of the attack five years ago on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, sparking divisions that still tarnish French society.
The victim of Friday’s attack sustained multiple stab wounds to the neck, according to a police representative. A police source said the teacher had been beheaded in the attack.
French broadcaster BFMTV reported that the alleged attacker was 18 years old and was born in Moscow.
A police source said that witnesses had heard the attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” or “God is the greatest.” A police spokesman said the information was being verified.
The attack took place on the street in front of the secondary school where the victim worked, in the suburb of Conflans Sainte-Honorine.
CIVICS LESSON
According to French media reports, the teacher who was killed earlier this month had shown students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a civics lesson on freedom of expression.
A Twitter thread posted on October 9 contained a video of a man who said that his daughter, a Muslim, was one of the students in the class and that she was shocked and upset by the teacher’s actions.
The man in the video urged Twitter users to complain to authorities and remove the teacher from his post. Reuters was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the video.
In recent years, France has witnessed a series of violent attacks by Islamist militants, including the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015, and the November 2015 bombings and shootings at the Bataclan theater and at locations in Paris that killed to 130 people.
Less than a month ago, a man from Pakistan used a butcher knife to attack and injure two people who were smoking cigarettes outside the offices where Charlie Hebdo was based at the time of the 2015 attack.
The issue of the cartoons was revived last month when Charlie Hebdo decided to republish them to coincide with the start of the trial of accomplices in the 2015 attack.
Al-Qaeda, the militant Islamist group that claimed responsibility for those killings, threatened to attack Charlie Hebdo again after he republished the cartoons.
The magazine said last month that it published to assert its right to free speech and to show that it would not be intimidated by violent attacks. That position was endorsed by many prominent French politicians and public figures.
In reaction to Friday’s attack outside the school, Charlie Hebdo wrote on his Twitter account: “Intolerance has crossed a new threshold and does not seem to give ground to anything to impose its terror on our country.” – Reuters
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