Murdered history teacher was target of angry campaign on social media

PARIS — Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded outside his school in a Paris suburb, was described by his pupils and their parents as caring and professional. But he was killed after becoming the target of an angry campaign on social media.

Paty, 47, was killed on Friday by an 18-year-old man of Chechen origin. Prosecutors said the attacker, shot dead by police soon after, wanted to punish the teacher for showing his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics class on freedom of expression earlier this month.

Parents said they were mystified how the civics class could have escalated into a motive for a gruesome murder.

Prosecutors offered a clue on Saturday when they said they detained two men, one the father of a pupil at the school and another on the radar of intelligence services, who they said had used social media to turn a dispute over the civics class into a campaign against the teacher.

The first sign of an issue emerged on Oct. 7 when the parent of a girl who was in the class posted an angry video on Facebook. In it, he said the teacher had shown the cartoons of Mohammad and that his daughter, a Muslim, had been disciplined for expressing her displeasure.

The man, not named by officials, said he wanted the teacher removed.

The next day, the father went to see the principal of the school to complain, prosecutors said. That evening, he put out another Facebook video, giving the name of the teacher and identifying the school.

On Oct. 12, another video appeared on YouTube, featuring the father of the pupil. A man off-camera interviewed the man's daughter. The voice off-camera threatened a demonstration if the teacher was not removed.

Both men were detained by police after Paty's killing.

Staff at the school sought to resolve the row. The principal arranged a meeting with those parents unhappy about the civics lesson. The parent who published the Facebook video did not come, prosecutors said.

By Tuesday this week, the principal had succeeded in calming the atmosphere at the school, according to a local official, but by then, though, the issue had escalated.

According to prosecutors, the school had been receiving threats since the social media videos started appearing.

— GETTY IMAGES A teacher stands with a placard defending freedom of speech near the entrance of a middle school after a teacher was decapitated by an attacker.