France closes Paris mosque over teacher’s beheading
The order came after police on Monday launched a series of raids targeting Islamist networks, mainly in the Paris region
PARIS, France (AFP) — French authorities said Tuesday they would close a Paris mosque in a clampdown on radical Islam that has yielded over a dozen arrests following the beheading of a teacher who had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The mosque in a densely-populated suburb northeast of Paris had published a video on its Facebook page days before Friday’s gruesome murder, railing against teacher Samuel Paty’s choice of material for a class discussion on freedom of expression, said a source close to the investigation.
The interior ministry said the mosque in Pantin, which has some 1,500 worshippers, would be shut on Wednesday night for six months.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has vowed there would be “not a minute’s respite for enemies of the Republic.”
The order came after police on Monday launched a series of raids targeting Islamist networks, mainly in the Paris region.
Paty, 47, was attacked on his way home from the junior high school where he taught in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, 40 kilometres (25 miles) northwest of the capital.
A photo of the teacher and a message confessing to his murder was found on the mobile phone of his killer, 18-year-old Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov, who also posted images of the decapitated body on Twitter. Anzorov was shot dead by police. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said Tuesday that Paty would be posthumously bestowed France’s highest order of merit, the Legion of Honour, for having been “martyred” because of his profession.
The murder was preceded by a fierce online campaign against Paty and the school, led by the father of a schoolgirl who accused the teacher of disseminating “pornography” for showing a cartoon of the prophet naked.
The school said Paty had given Muslim pupils the choice to leave the classroom.
The father who posted the video shared by the Pantin mosque is among 15 people arrested after the killing, along with a known Islamist radical and four members of Anzorov’s family. Darmanin accused the father and the radical of having issued a “fatwa” against the teacher.