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French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that the murder of the teacher, who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a classroom, is an “Islamic terrorist attack.”
“One of our citizens was cowardly murdered because he was studying freedom of expression and belief and was the victim of an Islamist terrorist attack,” Macron told reporters near the scene of the attack, where the perpetrator cut off the head of the victim before it the police will shoot him.
The French president made it clear that “the whole nation” is ready to defend teachers and that “obscurantism will not prevail.”
Early Friday, French police announced that they had killed a man minutes after killing a teacher, but he was killed on a street in a Paris suburb.
The teacher had shown his high school students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which Muslims consider blasphemy (infidelity), according to a police source.
Police sources said that witnesses heard the attacker chanting “God is great” and that the victim was beheaded at the scene, but that information is being verified.
French Interior Minister Gerard Darmanen announced the creation of a crisis center to deal with Friday’s attack.
In recent years, France has witnessed a series of violent attacks by Islamist militants, including the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015, the bombings and the November 2015 shootings at the Bataclan theater and locations in Paris, killing 130 people.
