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Updated 2 hours ago
AN ASSAULT HAS beheaded a history teacher in France who had recently shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class, police said.
The attacker, whose identity has not been established, was shot by police while trying to arrest him and later died from his injuries, they said.
The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar”, which means “God is great” when the police confronted him, a cry often heard in jihadist attacks, a police source said.
French counterterrorism prosecutors said they were treating the assault as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization” and related to a “criminal association with terrorists.”
French President Emmanuel Macron will visit the site of the attack later today, his office said.
The attack occurred on the outskirts of Paris around 5:00 p.m. (4:00 p.m. Irish time) near a school in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a northwestern suburb located about 30 kilometers from the center of the French capital.
According to a police source, the victim was a history teacher at a local high school who recently discussed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
‘Super nice, super friendly’
A parent of a student at the school said the teacher may have created a “controversy” by asking Muslim students to leave the room before showing the cartoons.
“According to my son, he was super nice, super nice, super nice,” the mother, Nordine Chaouadi, told AFPTV.
The teacher “simply said to the Muslim children, ‘Go away, I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’ That’s what my son told me, ”he said.
Last month, charges were brought against a 25-year-old Pakistani who injured two people with a butcher knife 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.
Today, police arrived at the scene 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. The man later died from his injuries, a judicial source said.
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‘Abominable’
The scene was cordoned off and a bomb disposal unit dispatched due to the alleged presence of an explosive vest, the police source said.
French President Emmanuel Macron is seen outside of high school.
Source: AP / PA Images
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who was visiting Morocco at the time of the attack, returned to Paris immediately after speaking with Macron as well as Prime Minister Jean Castex, his office said.
Macron briefly joined key ministers in a crisis group established in the Interior Ministry, the president’s office said, before traveling to the site of the attack where he will meet with school teachers.
The French parliament suspended today’s debate following the news of the beheading, and the session’s president, Hugues Renson, visibly shaken, called the attack “abominable.”
MPs rose to their feet when Renson said that “on behalf of all of us, I want to honor the memory of the victim.”
Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer tweeted: “The Republic is under attack,” adding that “our unity and steadfastness are the only answers to the monstrosity that is Islamist terrorism.”
The attack comes just days after a supporter of the Islamic State militant group who attacked a police officer in front of 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.”
© AFP 2020
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