Nine people detained over beheading of French teacher in Paris suburb

From France 24 and The Telegraph

The man suspected of beheading a French teacher who had shown pupils cartoons of the prophet Mohammed was an 18-year-old born in Moscow and originating from Russia’s southern region of Chechnya, a judicial source told AFP on Saturday. Five new people were detained, bringing to nine the total number under arrest over the terrorist probe. . . among them two parents of pupils at the College du Bois d’Aulne … the parents of the killer, his 17-year-old brother and his grandfather.  

(The) teacher … was named as Samuel Paty, a married father, today. 

The killer, who was shot dead by police on Friday in broad daylight, was identified as Abdoulakh A, an 18 year-old Chechen Russian born in Moscow, who had been granted a 10-year residency in France as a refugee in March.

The attacker, who was killed by police after shooting at them with an airgun that fired plastic pellets, was not one of Mr Paty’s students. He was never educated in the Paris suburb and lived in Evreux in Normandy.

He had approached pupils in the street and asked them to point out his victim, anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said on Saturday. . . He had been seen at the school asking students about the teacher, and the headmaster had received several threatening phone calls. Investigators are trying to establish how the killer, who was not known to intelligence services, was able to find Mr Paty.

Mr Paty was decapitated with a butcher’s knife in the street about three hundred metres from the school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, north-west of Paris at around 5pm. A photo of his severed head was posted to the killer’s Twitter account,

A week earlier, one man who said his daughter was in Mr Paty’s class recorded a video shared on social media in which he branded the teacher a thug and appealed to others to “join forces and say ‘stop, don’t touch our children'”. It was not clear whether the parent was one of those in police custody. It was also not immediately known if the attacker had seen the video.

“Our community is horrified like all French people by this incident,” said the Strasbourg-based Assembly of Chechens in Europe. It said “that no community can be held responsible for all isolated acts of its nationals ”.

Marine le Pen said on Twitter ““We have reached this unbearable level of barbarism. Islamism is bringing war to us: we must expel it from our country by force.”