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The victim rated without delay as a martyr for freedom of expression. French counter-terrorism prosecutors are investigating the attack, which took place in a suburb north of Paris.
By Adam Nossiter
PARIS – A guy with a knife beheaded an instructor near a school in a northern suburb of Paris on Friday afternoon and then shot him dead through the police, authorities said, beating France with a national trauma that revived memories of recent terrorist attacks.
A police officer and parents familiar with the attack showed French media reports that the victim was a school history instructor who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a loose speech class, which infuriated some Muslim families.
The teacher, not yet identified on Friday night, without delay portrayed as a martyr of freedom of expression across the political spectrum. Representatives of the French Parliament rose to “honour the reminiscence of the victim,” such as the president, Mr. Hugues Renson, and President Emmanuel Macron rushed to the site of the attack on Friday night.
“This is an attempt to overthrow the republic,” Macron said.
Taking advantage of the symbolic nature of an attack on an instructor and echoing the anti-Islamist themes he insisted on, Macron said the instructor had been “the victim of a terrorist and Islamist attack. “
The instructor was disabled “because he taught, because he taught freedom of expression, freedom for and not for Array,” the French president said in a brief televised speech.
France’s counter-terrorism prosecutors resumed investigation into the attack, which took place at the crossroads of two neighbouring suburbs of Paris, Eragny and Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
Many things remained volatile on Friday night in the absence of an official version of the police, but the underlying issues of what was known evoked the recent history of terrorist attacks in France: an assailant who consciously opts for a victim who sought to symbolize a crime opposed to Islam. .
The riots at the school over the instruction of the teacher, which Mr. Macron alluded to in his comments, had obviously preceded the murder. “We’ve noticed the director, who in recent weeks has put up with a lot of pressure with remarkable courage,” Macron said.
In a video that circulated extensively on YouTube before the attack, a Muslim father at the school of instructors, bois-d’Aulne College, expresses his anger that an unidentified instructor asked Muslims in 13-year-old elegance to leave because “he’s going to show a photo that will surprise them.
The father asks in the video: “Why this hate?Why does a history instructor do this in 13-year-olds?”
The culprit is not known to have a connection to the school, French media reported that he was 18 years old and of Russian origin.
A police union official told French television station BFM that witnesses saw the attacker slit the throat of the victim. National police were called, authorities said, and after finding the decapitated victim, they confronted the assailant near the school. knife, threatened officials and, after refusing to surrender, fired 10 times, they said.
The French media, who brought witnesses, said the aggressor heard “Allahu akbar” shout at the time of the knife attack. A photograph of a corpse mendacity in the middle of a tree-lined suburban street gave the impression on French television a short time later.
The attack came three weeks after an assailant with a knife wounded two other people in Paris near the site of former Charlie Hebdo, the scene of a 2015 terrorist attack in the satirical newspaper over his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
French officials from all political headquarters rushed to report the murder of the master. The minister of the interior in police rate interrupted an official to Morocco and flew to Paris.
“The murder of a history professor is an attack on freedom of expression and the values of the republic,” said the president of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand, on Twitter. “To attack an instructor is to attack all the French and freedom. “
“Horrible, great emotion and anger at this terrorist barbarity,” a socialist MP, Boris Vallaud, wrote on Twitter.
In the video, the father highlights what his daughter told him happened in class.
“So this week it was allowed to tell them, Muslims, Muslim scholars are raising their hands,” the parents say. “Then they raised their hands and he said, ‘Well, leave the class. ‘asked him ”why?” And he said he was going to show a picture that would surprise them, and then showed them a naked man, telling them that he was the prophet.
Another mother, Carine Mendes, 41, whose son had attended class, presented a more nuanced view of what happened and called the teacher “a very soft person, in his words, in his expressions. “
Mendes said the instructor had warned that Muslim scholars who did not need to see them temporarily leave the classroom and asked those who stayed not to tell their fellow Muslims about it so as not to offend their faith.
“He tried to do things with respect, he didn’t need to hurt anyone,” he said.
But at one point the elegance where the instructor gave him elegance, a surprised student refused to leave the room and told her father what happened, who then complained in the video posted online.
The next day, the instructor apologized to his students and the principal emailed the parents to explain the situation. The instructor’s suggestion to leave the classroom, the principal said, had been delicate.
“Without wanting to offend anyone, it turned out that by giving this opportunity to students, he was still offended,” he reads in the principal’s email.
Mrs. Mendes, what had happened “was horrible. “
“He’s just taking a course on freedom of speech,” he said.
“An instructor killed just for doing his job,” Sophie Venetitay, director of the instructors’ union, told BFM.
Constant Méheut and Antonella Francini contributed to the report.
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