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Police officers, in the area of the attack, this Friday in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris.CHARLES PLATIAU / Reuters
A French history teacher who apparently had recently shown caricatures of Muhammad in class was beheaded this Friday in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, on the outskirts of Paris, in an act that is being investigated as a terrorist attack.
His alleged assailant, according to various media, an 18-year-old boy, was killed shortly after by police officers.
The national antiterrorist prosecutor's office has quickly opened an investigation for "murder in relation to a terrorist act" and for "association of terrorist criminals", judicial sources confirmed to this newspaper.
The attack has shaken a France especially alert these times to jihadist extremism.
If the link between the cartoons of Muhammad - which the murdered professor would have shown in connection with a class on freedom of expression - and the murder is confirmed, it would be the second attack in less than a month for this reason and when the trial for the January 2015 attacks in which the editorial staff of the satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
was massacred
for having published cartoons of Muhammad.
Just three weeks ago, a young Pakistani seriously wounded two people with a knife in front of the old newsroom of the publication in Paris.
The attacker confessed the facts and linked them to the publication by
Charlie Hebdo
, coinciding with the start of the trial, in early September, of the same cartoons that he had printed in 2006 in solidarity, initially in solidarity with the Danish daily
Jyllands-Posten
, which received death threats after publishing a few months before the drawings that, among others, characterize the Muslim prophet wearing a bomb instead of a turban.
French President Emmanuel Macron traveled at night to the scene of the attack, about 50 kilometers from Paris.
Shortly before, the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, also condemned an attack, which he considered an “attack on the Republic with the ignoble murder of one of its servants, a teacher”.
"Our unity and firmness are the only answers to the monstrosity of Islamist terrorism that we will face," he promised in a message on social networks.
The condemnation of this jihadist murder has been unanimous in France.
In the National Assembly, meeting when the attack became known, the deputies rose from their seats to "honor the memory" of the professor and denounce an "abominable attack." The president of the Hauts-de-France region, the conservative Xavier Bertrand , denounced that "Islamist barbarism has attacked one of the symbols of our Republic, the school. Let them know that we will not bend: they will never forbid us to read, write, draw, think, teach," he said. Also the leader of the leftist Francia Insoumise , Jean-Luc Mélenchon, denounced an “ignoble crime” perpetrated by someone who “dirties his religion and inflicts the hell of having to live with the murderers of his species”.
According to the first information, a police patrol received a call around 5:00 p.m. alerting to the presence of a suspicious individual who was hanging around a school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine and carrying a knife.
When the agents asked him to drop his weapon, he refused and, "aggressive and threatening", was killed by the police, who about 200 meters further found the professor's decapitated body near his institute, according to the Agence France Presse .
