Police arrived at the scene after receiving a call about a suspicious individual (Representative)
Paris France:
A history teacher who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class was beheaded on Friday and his attacker was shot to death by French police as they tried to arrest him, police and prosecutors said.
French counterterrorism prosecutors said they were investigating the assault that occurred on the outskirts of Paris at around 5 pm (1500 GMT) near a school in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a western suburb of the French capital.
According to a police source, the victim was a history teacher who recently spoke about cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
Prosecutors said they were treating the incident as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization” and related to a “criminal association with terrorists.”
The accusations are similar to charges brought last month against a 25-year-old Pakistani who wounded two people in a butcher knife attack to avenge the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The attacker seriously injured two employees of a television production company whose offices are on the same block that used to house Charlie Hebdo. They both survived.
That attack came three weeks after an ongoing trial of the alleged accomplices of the perpetrators of the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, which also saw a female police officer shot dead in the street.
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.
The trial has sparked protests across France, with thousands of protesters against Charlie Hebdo and the French government.
Police arrived at the scene on Friday after receiving a call about a suspicious individual loitering near the school, a police source said.
There they found the dead man and nearby they sighted the suspect armed with a weapon similar to a knife who threatened them while they tried to arrest him.
They opened fire and seriously wounded him, the source said. He later died from his injuries, a judicial source said.
The scene was cordoned off and a bomb disposal unit dispatched due to the alleged presence of an explosive vest, the police source said.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, on a visit to Morocco, will return to Paris immediately after speaking with Prime Minister Jean Castex and President Emmanuel Macron, his office said.
Macron will join key ministers in a crisis group established in the Interior Ministry, the president’s office said.
The attack comes just days after a supporter of the Islamic State terror group who attacked a police officer outside the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris with a hammer was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
Farid Ikken, 43, charged officers patrolling in front of the cathedral on June 6, 2017, shouting “this is for Syria.”
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