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CONFLANS-SAINTE-HONORINE, France: French police were questioning nine people in custody on Saturday (October 17) after a suspected militant sympathizer beheaded a school teacher in broad daylight on the street of a suburb of Paris, police sources said.
Police shot dead the attacker minutes after he killed 47-year-old history teacher Samuel Paty on Friday. Investigators were trying to establish whether he had acted alone or had accomplices. French media reported that he was an 18-year-old of Chechen origin.
Paty had shown her students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad earlier this month in a civics class on freedom of expression, which angered several Muslim parents. Muslims believe that any representation of the Prophet is blasphemous.
Prime Minister Jean Castex said the attack bore the stamp of religious terrorism and promised that his government would respond.
“I want to share with you my utter indignation. Secularism, the backbone of the French Republic, was the target of this vile act,” said Castex.
Four relatives of the attacker, including a minor, were arrested immediately after the attack in the middle-class suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, according to police sources.
Five more were detained overnight, including two parents of students from the College du Bois d’Aulne, where the teacher worked.
The beheading of a teacher on the outskirts of Paris has shocked France. (AFP / Abdulmonam EASSA)
A week earlier, a man who said his daughter was in Paty’s class recorded a video shared on social media in which he called the teacher a bully and exhorted 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.
The parents of the students placed flowers at the door of the school. Some said their children were distraught.
“(My daughter) is in pieces, terrified by the violence of such an act. How am I going to explain the unthinkable to her?” a father wrote on Twitter.
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, said of the massacre: “It is not a civilization that kills an innocent person, it is barbarism.”
The litany of deadly attacks by militants or their supporters was devastating for the Muslim community in France, Oubrou told France Inter.
“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.”
