Teacher Slain Outside School in Crime Echoing Charlie Hebdo Attack

Macron calls him 'the victim of an Islamist terrorist attack'
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 16, 2020 5:15 PM CDT
Teacher Slain Outside School in Crime Echoing Charlie Hebdo Attack
French President Emmanuel Macron, flanked by French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, second left, speaks in front of the school in Conflans Sainte-Honorine.   (Abdulmonam Eassa, Pool via AP)

A teacher was brutally slain Friday outside his school in a Paris suburb after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that Muslims find blasphemous. "He was teaching pupils about freedom of expression," French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters at the school, Reuters reports. Macron, who met with school staff members, said the teacher was "the victim of an Islamist terrorist attack." The teacher, who was not identified, was killed in the street in front of the school in Conflans Sainte-Honorine. Police said the victim had multiple neck wounds, and one official said he was beheaded. The male suspect was shot to death by a patrol a few blocks away, police said, after he refused to put his arms down when officers ordered him to. Police opened an investigation with terror as a possible motive.

The teacher had been threatened, police said, after a class discussion about the caricatures last week, per the AP. The attack was the second since the trial began in the 2015 slayings of 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical publication that had printed charicatures of Islam's prophet. An 18-year-old man from Pakistan, who told police he was upset by the cartoons, stabbed two people outside the paper's former offices. The victims survived. The divisions in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo publication, and the slayings, remain raw in France. Officials say Islamic radicals are forming a parallel society, and Macron's administration is developing legislation to address the issue. At the school, Macron said France shouldn't fall into the trap of division. "We must all stand together as citizens," he said. (The paper reprinted the caricatures as the trial began.)

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