French police conduct raids in crackdown after teacher beheading
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[October 19, 2020]
PARIS (Reuters) - French police on
Monday raided Islamic associations and foreigners suspected of extremist
religious beliefs, police sources said, three days after a suspected
Islamist beheaded a school teacher.
History teacher Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered on Friday in broad
daylight outside his school in a middle-class Paris suburb by an
18-year-old of Chechen origin. Police shot the attacker dead.
The teenage assassin sought to avenge his victim's use of caricatures of
the Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression to
13-year-olds. Muslims believe that any depiction of the Prophet is
blasphemous.
Public figures called the killing an attack on the Republic and on
French values.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said there were some 80 investigations
being conducted into online hate and that he was looking into whether to
disband about 50 associations within the Muslim community.
"Police operations have taken place and more will follow, concerning
tens of individuals," the minister told Europe 1.
A police source on Sunday said France was preparing to deport 213
foreigners who were on a government watchlist and suspected of holding
extreme religious beliefs, among whom about 150 are serving jail
sentences.
The deportations were already being worked on before Friday's attack, a
security source said.
Police detained 10 people in connection with the attack in the 24 hours
that followed Paty's killing. Among them, prosecutors said, were the
father of a pupil at Paty's school and another person on the radar of
intelligence services, who they said had used social media to campaign
against the teacher.
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People gather at the Place de la Republique in Paris, to pay tribute
to Samuel Paty, the French teacher who was beheaded on the streets
of the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France, October 18,
2020. Placard reads "I am a teacher". REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File
Photo
A judicial source told Reuters the man known to the intelligence
agencies was Moroccan-born Abdelhakim Sefriuoi. Sefriuoi has for
years used social media to fight against what he calls "Islamaphobia"
and to put pressure on the government over its treatment of Muslims.
In 2011, he agitated against a high school in Saint-Ouen, a
working-class city with a large Muslim community near Paris, because
it wanted to ban clothing used by Muslim girls to circumvent a ban
on veils.
Sefriuoi has been on the French intelligence services watchlist for
more than 15 years, security sources told Reuters.
Darmanin said the two men's calls for action against Paty served as
a Fatwa against him.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Jean-Stephane Brosse and Tangi Salaün;
Editing by Jon Boyle, Timothy Heritage, William Maclean)
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