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PARIS (Reuters) – French police arrested nine people after a suspected Islamist sympathizer beheaded a school teacher on the street in a Paris suburb on Friday, police sources said.
Investigators were trying to establish whether the attacker, who was shot and killed by police, had acted alone or had accomplices. French media reported that he was an 18-year-old of Chechen origin.
Witnesses heard the assailant shouting “Allahu Akbar” or “God is the greatest,” a police source said. His victim, a history teacher, had shown her students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad earlier this month in a civics class on freedom of expression.
President Emmanuel Macron called the incident Islamist terrorism.
Four relatives of the attacker, including a minor, were detained in the immediate hours of the attack in the bourgeois suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, police sources said.
Five more were detained overnight, including two parents of students from the College du Bois d’Aulne, where the teacher worked.
Muslim leaders condemned the murder, which many public figures perceived as an attack on the essence of the French state and its values of secularism, freedom of worship, and freedom of expression.
Tareq Oubrou, the imam of a Bordeaux mosque, denied that the murder marked a clash of civilizations.
“It is not a civilization that kills an innocent person, it is barbarism,” Oubrou told France Inter, adding that the litany of deadly attacks by Islamist militants or their sympathizers was devastating for the Muslim community in France.
“Every day that passes without incident we give thanks,” he said. “We are between the hammer and the anvil. It attacks the Republic, society, peace and the very essence of religion, which is about union.”
(Reporting by Tangi Salaun and Geert de Clercq; written by Richard Lough; edited by Kirsten Donovan)
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