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PARIS (Reuters) – A man armed with a knife on Friday killed a high school history teacher by cutting his throat in front of his school in a Paris suburb, police said, in an attack that was being treated as terrorism.
The attacker was shot and killed by a police patrol a few streets away. The teacher had shown the students in his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which Muslims consider blasphemy, according to a police source.
France’s counter-terrorism prosecutor said he was investigating the attack, which took place in Conflans Sainte-Honorine, a suburb northwest of Paris. President Emmanuel Macron arrived at the scene on Friday night.
French broadcaster BFMTV reported that the alleged attacker was 18 years old and was born in Moscow.
The incident had echoes of the attack five years ago on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, unleashing a problem that still clouds French society.
Less than a month ago, a man from Pakistan used a butcher knife to attack and injure two people who were smoking cigarettes outside the offices where Charlie Hebdo was based at the time of the 2015 attack.
In Friday’s attack, a police source said that witnesses had heard the attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is the greatest.” A police spokesman said the information was being verified.
Another police source also said that the victim had been beheaded in the attack, but this was not confirmed. The attack occurred on the street in front of the high school where the victim worked.
“MONSTROSITY”
“Tonight, it is the Republic that is under attack with the despicable murder of one of its servants, a teacher,” French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer wrote on Twitter.
“Our unity and determination are the only answers to the monstrosity of Islamist terrorism.”
A Twitter thread posted on October 9 contained allegations that a history teacher at Conflans Sainte-Honorine had shown students cartoons purporting to represent the Prophet Muhammad.
The thread contained a video of a man who said that his daughter, a Muslim, was one of the students in the class and that she was shocked and upset by the actions of the teacher.
The man in the video urged Twitter users to complain to authorities and remove the teacher from his post. Reuters was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the video.
CRISIS CENTER
French Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin said he had set up 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, and the November 2015 bombings and shootings at the Bataclan theater and sites around Paris that killed 130 people.
The issue of the cartoons was revived last month when Charlie Hebdo decided to republish them to coincide with the start of the trial of accomplices in the 2015 attack.
Al-Qaeda, the militant Islamist group that claimed responsibility for those killings, threatened to attack Charlie Hebdo again after he republished the cartoons.
The magazine said last month that it published to assert its right to free speech and to show that it would not be intimidated by violent attacks. That position was endorsed by many prominent French politicians and public figures.
In reaction to Friday’s attack outside the school, Charlie Hebdo wrote on his Twitter account: “Intolerance has crossed a new threshold and does not seem to give ground to anything to impose its terror on our country.”
(Reporting by Geert De Clercq and Dominique Vidalon; written by Christian Lowe; edited by Toby Chopra)
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