Beheaded after showing cartoons
French teacher decapitated after images of prophet displayed to students
PARIS: A French teacher who had recently shown students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was beheaded outside his school, in what President Emmanuel Macron called a “terrorist attack”.
The assailant, said to be an 18-year-old, was shot by police as they tried to arrest him and later died of his injuries, police said.
France has seen a wave of extremist violence since the 2015 terror attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in the capital.
French anti-terror prosecutors said they were treating the assault as “a murder linked to a terrorist organisation”.
The attack happened on the outskirts of Paris at around 5pm near the school where the teacher worked in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a suburb around 30km from the city centre.
The killing bore the hallmarks of “an extremist terrorist attack”, Macron said as he visited the scene.
Visibly moved, the president said “the entire nation” stood ready to defend teachers and that “obscurantism will not win”.
Four people, including a minor, have been arrested, a judicial source said yesterday.
All were related to the assailant, the source added.
The victim was a history teacher who recently showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on freedom of expression, police said.
A parent of a pupil at the school said the teacher might have stirred “controversy” by asking Muslim pupils to leave the room before showing the cartoons.
“According to my son, he was super nice, super friendly, super kind,” the parent, Nordine Chaouadi, said.
The teacher “simply said to the Muslim children: ‘Leave, I don’t want it to hurt your feelings.’ That’s what my son said,” the parent said.
Police said they were investigating a tweet posted from an account that showed a picture of the teacher’s head, and which has since been shut down.