[ad_1]
Updated 1 hour ago
FOUR SCHOOL CHILDREN are being detained by French police on suspicion of helping a man who beheaded a history teacher to identify his victim in exchange for money, a judicial source said.
They are among 15 people arrested in the incident, one of whom was previously convicted of terrorism-related offenses and admitted to having had contact with the man who killed Samuel Paty for showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad to his class, said the source. .
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the government will also tighten the noose on NGOs with ties to Islamist networks, including the high-profile Anti-Islamophobia collective.
“Fear is about to change sides,” President Emmanuel Macron told a meeting of key ministers yesterday to discuss a response to the attack.
“Islamists must not be allowed to sleep soundly in our country,” he said.
The attack has drawn parallels to the 2015 massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people, including several cartoonists, were shot dead for posting images of the prophet.
That attack, the first in a series of assaults that have killed more than 240 people in France, brought more than a million people to the streets of Paris to denounce extremism.
Yesterday, people gathered again at the Place de la Republique in Paris, where world leaders had marched alongside the French in 2015.
Some in the crowd chanted “I am Samuel,” echoing the 2015 “I am Charlie” campaign call from free speech supporters.
The far-right leader of the National Rally Marine Le Pen, who laid a wreath outside Paty’s school northwest of Paris on Monday, called for “wartime legislation” to combat the terrorist threat.
Le Pen, who has announced that he will run for a third French presidency in 2022, called for an “immediate” moratorium on immigration and deportation of all foreigners on terror watch lists.
Teacher targeted by ‘fatwa’
Paty, 47, was killed while returning home from the school where she taught in a northwestern suburb of Paris on Friday afternoon.
On the mobile phone of his murderer, an 18-year-old Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov, who was shot and killed by the police, a photo of the teacher and a message confessing his murder were found.
Anzorov’s family from Russia’s predominantly Muslim republic of Chechnya came to France to apply for asylum when he was six years old.
Four members of his family are being held for questioning.
They are among 15 people detained for the attack, including a known Islamist militant and the father of one of Paty’s students who criticized him online and called for his removal.
Darmanin accused the two men of having issued a “fatwa” against Paty, using the term from an Islamic edict that was used to describe the 1989 death sentence handed down on writer Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.
“Apparently they launched a fatwa against the teacher,” the minister told Europe 1 radio.
Paty, whom students and parents praised as a dedicated teacher, had shown Mohammed’s cartoons to her civics class.
No news is bad news
Support the magazine
your contributions help us continue to deliver the stories that are important to you
Support us now
According to his school, he had given Muslim children the option of leaving the classroom before showing the cartoons, saying he did not want to hurt their feelings.
‘We are not afraid’
French authorities have pledged to hunt down the authors of some 80 online messages of condolence to Anzorov and to increase security at schools when students return after midterm.
Yesterday, protesters in the Place de la Republique raised signs that read: “No to the totalitarianism of thought” and “I am a teacher.”
“You don’t scare us. We are not afraid. You will not divide us. We are France! “tweeted Prime Minister Jean Castex, who joined the Paris rally.
Friday’s attack was the second of its kind since a trial began last month for the Charlie Hebdo murders.
The magazine republished the controversial cartoons in the run-up to the trial, and last month a young Pakistani wounded two people with a butcher knife outside Charlie Hebdo’s former office.
As Charlie Hebdo’s trial resumed today, presiding judge Regis de Jorna expressed the court’s sadness over Paty’s murder, saying that “she died simply because she had conveyed to her students what freedom of thought and freedom of expression represent. ”.
© AFP 2020
[ad_2]