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PARIS (REUTERS, AFP) – The 18-year-old who beheaded a teacher outside the school in a Paris suburb where he taught approached the students on the street and asked them to point out his victim, the anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean- Francois Ricard. he said on Saturday.
The Moscow-born attacker was shot dead by police minutes after he killed 47-year-old history professor Samuel Paty in broad daylight in the suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on Friday.
A photograph of the teacher’s body, accompanied by a message of responsibility posted on Twitter, was found on a phone near the body of the assailant. Ricard said the Twitter account belonged to the attacker.
The post was quickly removed by Twitter, which said it had suspended the account because it violated company policy.
Ricard quoted the message as saying: “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most merciful … to (President Emmanuel) Macron, leader of the infidels, I have executed one of your hounds of hell who dared to despise (Prophet) Muhammad “.
Earlier this month, Paty had shown her students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics class on freedom of expression, which angered several Muslim parents. Muslims believe that any representation of the Prophet is blasphemous.
The attacker, of Chechen origin and had been living in the city of Evreux northwest of Paris, was previously unknown to intelligence services, Ricard told a news conference.
The antiterrorist prosecutor confirmed that the police had detained nine people in connection with the attack.
Investigators were still trying to establish whether the attacker, who was shot to death by police, had acted alone or had accomplices, law enforcement sources say.
Witnesses heard the assailant shout “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is the greatest,” a police source said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the shocking act bore the stamp of “an Islamist terrorist attack.”
Four relatives of the attacker, including a minor, were detained in the immediate hours of Friday’s attack in the middle-class suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, the sources said.
Later five more were arrested, including two parents of students at the College du Bois d’Aulne, where the professor worked.
A nation in shock
France will react most strongly to the attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex said on Saturday.
“Through one of its defenders, it is the Republic that has been struck to the heart by Islamist terrorism,” he wrote on Twitter. “In solidarity with its teachers, the State will react with the greatest firmness so that the Republic and its citizens live free! We never give up. Never.”
The day before, speaking near the place where the teacher was beheaded, Macron, visibly shaken, said that “the whole nation” is ready to defend the teachers and that “obscurantism will not win.”
The attack took place on Friday afternoon near the secondary school where the teacher worked in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a northwestern suburb about 30 km from central Paris.
Police arrived at the scene after receiving a call about a suspicious individual loitering near the school, a police source said.
They discovered the dead teacher and soon saw the suspect, armed with a sword, who threatened the officers as they tried to arrest him. They opened fire and then he died from his injuries.
Identification documents found on the suspect showed that he was an 18-year-old born in Moscow but from the southern Russian region of Chechnya.
Class discussion
The history teacher, Mr. Paty, had had a recent class discussion on freedom of expression, during which he showed his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The lesson prompted complaints from some parents.
According to a source, the two detained parents had disagreed with the teacher’s decision to show the cartoons.
A week earlier, a man who said his daughter was in class had recorded a video shared on social media in which he called the teacher a bully and urged others to “join forces and say ‘stop, don’t touch our sons’. ”.
It was unclear if the father was one of those in police custody. It was also not immediately known whether the attacker had seen the video.
Muslim leaders have 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,” he 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. ”
Students, parents pay tribute
At school, parents and teachers paid tribute to the victim.
“(My daughter) is in pieces, terrified by the violence of such an act. How am I going to explain the unthinkable? a father wrote on Twitter.
“According to my son, he was super nice, super nice, super nice,” said Mr. Nordine Chaouadi, another parent, adding that his son said the teacher had “just told Muslim children: ‘Go away, I don’t want to hurt your feelings. ‘
The attack came while a trial for the January 2015 massacre was underway at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked a wave of anger across the Islamic world.
The magazine had defiantly republished the cartoons in the lead up to the opening of the trial last month.
In the same month, a young Pakistani wounded two people with a butcher knife outside the magazine’s former offices.
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