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Solidarity rallies will be held in France Sunday to condemn the attack, during which an eighteen-year-old cut off the head of a teacher for showing students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
The murder of history professor Samuel Paty in a Paris suburb on Friday sparked a wave of outrage in France and revived memories of a 2015 wave of Islamist violence following the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“It is very important to mobilize and show solidarity and national cohesion,” Jean-Michel Blanquer, Minister of Education, told France 2, calling on “everyone to support the teachers.”
A demonstration is expected to take place in the Place de la République, a traditional protest venue with around 1.5 million people in 2015. People had gathered to condemn the deadly armed attack by Islamists against the editorial team of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The rallies will also take place in Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Nantes, Marseille, Lille and Bordeaux.
French counter-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said Paty had received threats online for showing cartoons, and a student’s father had sent an online invitation to “mobilize” against a teacher.
Shortly after the attack, 18-year-old suspect Chechen Abdullakh A was shot by police during the confrontation.
Witnesses to the events said he was seen on a school afternoon Friday afternoon, asking students where to find S. Paty.
Among those arrested are the schoolgirl’s father, a known Islamist militant, as well as several members of the suspect’s family.
An 11th person was arrested as the investigation continued on Sunday, a source in the judiciary said.
According to J.-F. Ricard, the school received threats in early October after a lesson with controversial cartoons, including a drawing of a naked prophet. The student’s father accused Mr. Paty of distributing “pornography.”
He named S. Paty as the culprit and cited the school’s leadership in a post posted on social media a few days before the attack.
President Emmanuel Macron called the teacher’s murder an Islamist terrorist attack.
“Immersed in religion”
J.-F. Ricard did not indicate whether the attacker had any contact with the school, its students and their parents, or whether he acted independently in response to the online campaign.
A photo of S. Paty and a report confessing to the murder were found on the attacker’s cell phone.
According to the prosecutor, the attacker had a knife, a pneumatic rifle, and five cartridges. When he was surrounded, he started shooting at the police officers and trying to stab them.
The attacker died of nine shots, J.-F. Ricard.
The Russian embassy in Paris said the suspect’s family came to France from Chechnya when he was six years old and requested asylum.
Residents of the Normandy city of the department of Evre, where the attacker lived, described him as discreet.
A local resident who studied with him at the school said the suspect had become very religious in recent years.
“In the past, he often got into fights, but for the past two or three years he had calmed down” and “immersed himself in religion,” the local added.
Friday’s attack was the second such incident since last month’s trial for a bloody attack in January 2015 on the editorial office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
As court drew near, the magazine reprinted controversial cartoons, and last month a young Pakistani from the magazine’s former editorial office injured two people with a meat chop.
J.-F. Ricard said that Paty’s murder showed the “very high level of terrorist threat” that France still faces, but added that the attacker was not known to French intelligence services.
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