France teacher’s killer had ‘contact’ with jihadist in Syria

PARIS: The investigation into the murder of a French teacher for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class turned to Syria on Thursday, where the killer was in contact with a Russian-speaking jihadist, it emerged Thursday.

Seven people have been charged with being complicit in a “terrorist murder” after 18year-old Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov beheaded Samuel Paty on the outskirts of Paris on Friday, including two teenagers who helped the killer identify his victim.

France paid homage to Paty on Wednesday, with President Emmanuel Macron saying that the history and geography teacher had been slain by “cowards” for representing the secular, democratic values of the French Republic.

On the eve of Friday Muslim prayers, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) sent French imams a text to draw from in their preaching.

“We Muslims are not persecuted in France,” the statement read.

“We are sometimes targets of anti-Muslim acts... but “others are also victims of hostile acts. In the face of these provocations we must remain dignified, calm and lucid.”

Anti-terror investigators have now established that Anzorov, who moved to France with his family from the Russian republic of Chechnya as a child, had been in contact with a jihadist in Syria, a source close to the case told AFP.

The identity of the Russianspeaking

jihadist is not yet known, the source added.

Le Parisien newspaper reported on Thursday that Anzorov’s suspected contact had been located through an IP address traced back to Idlib, a jihadist holdout in northwestern Syria.

Idlib is controlled by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, formerly Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, but has also become the refuge for several jihadist splinter groups.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has reported the presence of thousands of foreign nationals, including French, British

and Chechen fighters in the region.

In an audio message in Russian immediately after the killing, translated by AFP, Anzorov said that he had “avenged the Prophet” whom the teacher had shown “in an insulting way”.

The message was published on social media in a video, accompanied by two tweets

Moments later he was shot dead by police.