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PARIS (AP) – For the second time in three weeks, terror hit France, this time with the horrific beheading of a history teacher on a street in a Paris suburb. The alleged attacker was shot and killed by the police.
French President Emmanuel Macron denounced what he called an “Islamist terrorist attack” and urged the nation to stand united against extremism. The teacher had discussed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad of Islam with his class, authorities said.
The French antiterrorist prosecutor opened an investigation for murder with an alleged terrorist motive. Four people, one minor, were detained hours later, the anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard’s office said without giving further details. Police are typically deployed to find family and friends of potential suspects in terrorism cases.
Macron visited the school where the teacher worked in the town of Conflans-Saint-Honorine and met with staff after the murder. An Associated Press reporter saw three ambulances at the scene, heavily armed police surrounding the area, and police vans lined up on nearby tree-lined streets.
“One of our compatriots was killed today because he taught … freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not to believe,” Macron said.
He said the attack should not divide France because that is what the extremists want. “We must all be together as citizens,” he said.
The incident came as the Macron government is working on a bill to tackle radical Islamists who authorities say are creating a parallel society outside of the values of the French Republic. France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe with up to 5 million members, and Islam is the country’s No. 2 religion.
A police officer said the suspect, armed with a knife and an airsoft pistol, which shoots plastic pellets, was shot and killed about 600 meters (yards) from where the teacher was killed after he failed to respond to orders. to lower your arms. and acted threateningly.
The teacher had received threats after opening a discussion “for a debate” about the cartoons about 10 days ago, the police officer told The Associated Press. A student’s father had filed a complaint against the teacher, another police officer said, adding that the alleged killer did not have a child at the school.
An identification card was found at the scene, but police were verifying identity, the police officer said. French media reported that the suspect was an 18-year-old Chechen, born in Moscow. That information could not be immediately confirmed.
France has seen occasional violence involving its Chechen community in recent months, in the Dijon region, the Mediterranean city of Nice and the western city of Saint-Dizier, believed to be linked to local criminal activity.
It was not known what link, if any, the attacker might have with the master or if he had accomplices. Police were deploying searches of homes and possible relatives and friends of the man in question, the police officer said.
The two officials could not be named because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigations.
“We didn’t see it coming,” Conflans resident Remi Tell, who as a child attended Bois D’Aulne High School, said on CNews television station. He described the city as peaceful.
It was the second terrorism-related incident since the opening of an ongoing trial for the January 2015 newsroom massacre at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of the prophet of Islam.
When the trial began, the newspaper reprinted cartoons of the prophet to underscore the right to freedom of expression. Quickly, a young man from Pakistan was arrested after stabbing two people with a butcher knife in front of the old newspaper offices. They were not seriously injured. The 18-year-old told police he was upset by the publication of the cartoons.
In a video recently posted on social media, a man who described himself as a father at school said that the teacher who was killed had recently displayed an offensive image of a man and told students that he was “the prophet of the Muslims “. Before showing the pictures, the teacher asked the Muslim children to leave the room because he planned to show something shocking, the man said.
What was the message you wanted to send to these children? … Why does a history teacher behave in this way in front of 13-year-olds? the man asked. He called other angry parents to contact him and get the message across.
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Michel Euler at Conflans-Saint-Honorine, Angela Charlton in Paris, and Nicolas Vaux-Montagny in Lyon contributed to this report.
