French teacher stabbed in class by man claiming IS link IS orders killing of children with Down’s Syndrome, disabilities: Reports
Assailant says it was a signal from Daesh, teacher taken to hospital
PARIS: A hooded man claiming to be acting for the Islamic State attacked a nursery school teacher with a knife-like weapon as he prepared for classes in a school north of Paris, French officials said on Monday.
The male teacher was taken to hospital after the attack by a man wielding a knife or boxcutter who fled the scene after the attack at about 0630 GMT, said the official, adding that anti-terrorism officials were investigating.
According to one judiciary official, the assailant slashed at the teacher’s neck and said the act was a signal from the Islamic State group, also referred to in France by the name Daesh.
“This is Daesh, it’s a warning,” the attacker told his victim, the official said, adding the victim’s life was apparently not in danger.
In a recent French-language publication, the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the deadly Paris attacks of November 13, denounced France’s state school system and urged readers to kill its teachers because they promoted what it called the evils of secular learning, music and drawing.
France’s education minister and a local government prefect visited the premises of the school in Aubervilliers, in the Saintdenis region just north of the capital. Classes at the school were cancelled.
The incident came a month after gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in Paris in an attack claimed by Islamic State, the militant Islamist group which controls swathes of Syria and Iraq and has vowed to attack France, a member of the coalition of countries conducting air strikes against it. NEW DELHI: The Islamic State has issued a fatwa asking its members to kill newborns and children suffering from Down’s Syndrome and other disabilities, according to Mosul Eye, an Iraqi activist group.
The IS has already executed 38 babies and children who were suffering from various deformities, the activist group said on its social media platforms. The victims range from ages of one week to three months.
According to several news reports, the oral fatwa was issued by Abu Said Aljazrawi, one of Islamic States’ Sharia judges. “We stand by what we published on our page, every word of it,” a blogger at Mosul Eye told HT.
“They were killed by either lethal injection or suffocation. Some of those killings took place in Syria and Mosul,” the Facebook post published by Mosul Eye claimed.
“...you don’t know how we live! It’s severe (sic) life. ISIL are savage gangs...inhuman and terrorists...they already killed their members whom can’t be treated medically,” Omar Aliraqi, a resident of Mosul, replied to the post on Facebook.
Some Facebook users likened the act to those by Nazis, who murdered disabled children as they were a “burden on the state”.
“I have just shed tears for these babies. I have two children with special needs, my heart is breaking. They are worse than the Nazis,” Jane Oakley, a British woman posted on Facebook.