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PARIS (Reuters) – The Chechen teenager who beheaded a French teacher for displaying cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class contacted a school parent who prosecutors say used social media to launch a hate campaign against the victim said a police source.
The source said the attacker sent an SMS message to the Muslim student’s father, adding that it was unclear if the father responded. BFM TV reported that it had exchanged WhatsApp messages with the killer in the days leading up to the attack.
The father is one of 16 people now in custody for the grisly murder of 47-year-old history professor Samuel Paty, which horrified a country whose deep-rooted democratic values, the government says, are under attack from within.
“The enemy is here,” Prime Minister Jean Castex told parliament shortly after lawmakers held a minute’s silence in the National Assembly. “Radical Islam has infiltrated our society founded on tolerance.”
Paty was beheaded on a street in broad daylight in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a middle-class suburb of Paris, by the 18-year-old Chechen, who was born in Moscow and had been living in France as a refugee.
Prosecutors said the attacker had approached the students outside the College du Bois d’Aulne and asked them to identify Paty as she was going home. French media reported that four of those questioned were students who accepted cash from the killer. It was unclear if they knew his ghoulish motive.
LEGION OF HONOR
A national tribute in honor of Paty will be held at the Sorbonne University in Paris on Wednesday. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said Paty would be posthumously awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award.
Prosecutors said the assailant, shot to death by police shortly after the attack, wanted to punish his victim for showing his students satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a class focused on freedom of expression earlier this month.
President Emmanuel Macron is increasingly concerned about what he calls Islamist separatism: the attempt by elements within France’s large Muslim community to impose conservative Islamic beliefs on the traditional values of the French Republic in some communities.
On Tuesday, authorities ordered the closure of a mosque in a Paris suburb that had shared on Facebook a video recorded by the father when he was detained by the police in which he demanded that Paty be fired and called him a bully.
In a later video, the father identified the school and teacher by name.
Castex told lawmakers that France needed a law that did not endanger other people’s lives through social media.
(Report from the Paris office, written by Geert De Clercq and Richard Lough, edited by Andrew Heavens and Mark Heinrich)
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