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A French teacher, who had recently shown students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, was beheaded in front of his school in Paris yesterday in what President Emmanuel Macron called an “Islamist terrorist attack.”
The attacker was an 18-year-old man of Chechen origin, a judicial source said. Four people, including a minor, have been arrested, the source added. They are all related to the suspect.
The attacker was shot by police as they tried to arrest him and later died of his injuries, police said.
He shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) when the police confronted him, a cry often heard in jihadist attacks, a police source said.
France has witnessed a wave of Islamist violence since the 2015 terrorist attacks against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in the capital.
French counterterrorism prosecutors said they were treating the assault as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization.”
The attack occurred on the outskirts of Paris around 5 p.m. yesterday near a school where the teacher worked in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a northwestern suburb about 30 kilometers from the city center.
The killing bore the stamp of “an Islamist terrorist attack,” Macron said while visiting the scene.
Visibly moved, the president said that “the entire nation” was ready to defend the teachers and that “obscurantism will not win.”
The victim was a history teacher who recently showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on freedom of expression, police said.
A parent of a student at the school said the teacher may have caused “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 AFP.
The teacher “simply told the Muslim children, ‘Go away, I don’t want it to hurt your feelings.’ That’s what my son told me.”
Police said they were investigating a tweet posted from an account that featured a photo of the teacher’s head and which has since been closed.
Residents in the generally quiet neighborhood said they were surprised when the school’s students, some accompanied by their parents, gathered on the street checking their phones for updates.
Police arrived at 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 them while they tried to arrest him.
They opened fire and seriously wounded him. The man later died from his injuries, a judicial source said.
The murder comes just days after a supporter of the Islamic State group who attacked a police officer with a hammer in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
And last month, charges were brought against a 25-year-old Pakistani man after he wounded two people with a butcher knife to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which allegedly led to the 2015 killings.
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.
In a tweet, Charlie Hebdo expressed his “sense of horror and revolt” at yesterday’s attack.
Jean-Remi Girard, president of the National Union of School Teachers, told BFM TV that children need to understand that blasphemy can shock, but it is legal.
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