Two of the suspect’s brothers and their grandparents were initially detained by the police for questioning.
Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France:
French police arrested nine people for the beheading of a teacher near his school in a Paris suburb, a judicial source said Saturday, in what President Emmanuel Macron called an Islamist terror attack.
The source said the murder was carried out by an 18-year-old Chechen, who was later shot dead by police near the scene in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris.
Police said the victim was 47-year-old history teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown his students some cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on free speech, a lesson that had prompted complaints from the parents.
Two of the suspect’s brothers and their grandparents were initially detained by the police for questioning.
The judicial source told AFP on Saturday that five more people had been detained, including the parents of a child at the school and friends of the suspect.
According to the source, the parents had expressed their disagreement with the teacher’s decision to show the cartoons.
The attack came while a trial for the January 2015 massacre was underway at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked a wave of anger across the Islamic world.
The magazine republished the cartoons in the run-up to the trial in September, and last month a young Pakistani wounded two people with a butcher knife outside his former offices.
‘Won’t win’
Documents found about the beheading suspect showed that he was an 18-year-old man born in Moscow but from the Chechnya region in southern Russia.
The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) when the police confronted him, a scream often heard in jihadist attacks, a police source said.
There was no prior indication that it was a potential radical, said a source close to the investigation.
French counterterrorism prosecutors said they were treating the assault as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization.”
Police said they were investigating a tweet posted from an account, since it was shut down, that featured a picture of the teacher’s head.
It was not clear if the attacker had posted the message, which contained a threat against Macron described as “the leader of the infidels,” they said.
Visibly moved while visiting the site, Macron said that “the entire nation” was ready to defend the teachers and that “obscurantism will not win.”
His office said Saturday that a “national tribute” would be held in honor of Paty.
Prime Minister Jean Castex tweeted that the teachers will continue “to awaken the critical spirit of the citizens of the republic, to emancipate them from all totalitarianism.”
The head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, expressed her condolences saying her thoughts were with teachers in France and across Europe.
“Without them, there are no citizens. Without them, there is no democracy,” he tweeted.
The Strasbourg-based Assembly of Chechens in Europe said in a statement that “like all French people, our community is horrified by this incident.”
‘Super friendly and kind’
Parents and teachers paid tribute to Paty, who was said to be well loved and a parent himself, by placing white roses outside the school and holding signs that read “I am a teacher – Freedom of speech.”
Martial, 16, said Paty loved her job: “She really wanted to teach us things, sometimes we had debates.”
Another student, Tiago, said he saw Paty the day she died. “He came to my class to see our teacher. It is shocking that I will not see him again.”
“According to my son, he was super nice, super nice, super nice,” Nordine Chaouadi, mother of one of Paty’s students, told AFP.
According to parents and teachers, Paty told Muslim children that they could leave before he showed the cartoon, telling them that she did not want to hurt their feelings.
Sources said that one of the detainees was a father who had posted a video on social media expressing his shock that cartoons showing the prophet “naked” had been shown in his daughter’s class.
In the video, the father reportedly called Paty a “naughty” who should no longer be a teacher and asked other parents to mobilize.
Rodrigo Arenas, director of the FCPE parents association, said a complaint was received from a “very agitated” parent.
He said that Paty had invited Muslim students out of the room before showing the cartoons.
Virginie, 15, said Paty did this every year as part of a discussion about freedom after the Charlie Hebdo attack.
In a tweet, Charlie Hebdo expressed his “sense of horror and revolt” over Friday’s attack.
Police rushed to the scene after receiving a call about a suspicious individual loitering near the school, a police source said.
They discovered the dead man and soon saw the suspect, armed with a sword, who threatened the officers as they tried to arrest him.
They opened fire and then he died from gunshot wounds.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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