Refugee Islamist terrorist ‘had links to ISIS’ before beheading teacher in France

From the Mail on Line and the Sunday Times

The Islamist terrorist who beheaded a teacher for showing a class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed had links to ISIS, it has been claimed. . . The prosecutor leading the investigation, Jean-François Ricard, revealed that Anzorov’s half-sister had travelled to join ISIS in Syria in 2014, the same year the group declared its Caliphate…and was the subject of an anti-terrorist investigation..

He added that the suspect, who had been granted a 10-year residency as a refugee in March and was not known to intelligence services, had been armed with a knife and an airsoft gun, which fires plastic pellets. 

A father of a 13-year-old pupil at the secondary school in middle-class Conflans-Sainte-Honorine told Reuters Mr Paty had told any Muslim students to leave because the cartoon would likely cause offence.  

However, one pupil stayed behind by mistake, and later told her Muslim parents. They filed a complaint against the teacher and held a meeting with Mr Paty, the school principal and an official from the education authority.    

Brahim Chnina, who said his daughter was in the class, branded Mr Paty a thug in a video posted on Twitter sometime in the last week, where he asked the community to complain about his behaviour.  

 They included a video, viewed more than 27,000 times, in which he denounced the teacher as a “thug” who “should no longer stay in the national education system” and urged other parent to mobilise against him. The video sparked community outrage and was shared by a mosque in Pantin, a Parisian suburb. Comments posted under the videos since the murder included several describing it as a “divine punishment” for Paty’s actions.

Chnina also claimed that Muslim pupils had been ordered out of the classroom. Paty denied this, saying he had instead suggested to Muslim children they might want to look away, and responded with a counter-complaint accusing Chnina of defamation. After an investigation, the headmistress of the school found in the teacher’s favour.

The incident nevertheless appeared to have got to Paty: another pupil, Myriam, 13, said the teacher seemed quiet and unhappy and scowled while walking in the corridors. “I heard pupils saying ‘he is racist’; others were calling him an Islamophobe,” she told Ouest France.

Other pupils defended him. “He knew his subject very deeply. He really wanted to teach us things,” said Martial, 16.

The killer is presumed to have seen the video and acted upon it. Chnina and a friend — Abdelhakim Sefraoui, a leading Islamic activist — were detained yesterday, along with four other people.

Video and images of the killing that the attacker sent to fellow Russian-speaking Isis supporters were yesterday being shared among Chechen pro-Isis accounts on the Telegram message sharing service. Seen by The Sunday Times, they included a grisly photograph of the head of the victim lying on the road and a message in which Anzorov confessed to the murder.

French anti-terror prosecutors said they were treating the assault as ‘a murder linked to a terrorist organisation’.

Lawmakers and teachers’ unions hailed the slain teacher’s courage for confronting challenging taboos in French society. Freedom of expression was a core tenet of democracy, they said. Jean-Remi Girard, president of the National Union of School Teachers, told BFM TV that children needed to understand that blasphemy can shock, but is legal.  

Xavier Bertrand, centre-Right president of the Hauts-de-France region, saying: ‘Islamist barbarity has taken aim at one of the symbols of the Republic: school. The terrorists want to shut us up, to bring us to our knees. They should know that we will not bend, they will never forbid us to read, write, draw, think, teach.’