French Police shot dead a man who decapitated a teacher with knife
An 18-year-old man decapitated a history-geography teacher near a school in a suburb north of Paris on Friday, before being shot dead by police.
The teacher had recently shown his class cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in Charlie Hebdo magazine, which led to a terror attack on the publication in 2015.
Officers were called to the area after reports of a suspicious man loitering near the victim’s school. They found the dead victim and saw the alleged perpetrator nearby. He was then shot dead after allegedly threatening officers.
Five suspects were arrested on Friday night, bringing the total number of people detained in connection to the killing to nine, including the grandparents, parents and 17-year-old brother of the suspected attacker.
The suspect is alleged to be an 18-year-old born in Moscow and originating from Chechnya, the predominantly Muslim Russian republic in the North Caucasus.
President Emmanuel Macron called the attack an “Islamist terrorist attack”.
Macron, who visited the site near a school in a Paris suburb, said the victim had been “assassinated” and that his killer sought to “attack the republic and its values”. “This is our battle and it is existential. They [terrorists] will not succeed … They will not divide us.”
The president spoke after French police shot dead a man who decapitated a teacher with a large kitchen knife. Officials swiftly announced the killing was being investigated by an anti-terror judge.
France has seen a wave of Islamist violence since the 2015
