PARIS (FRANCE) – French police said on Saturday that nine people have been arrested after a suspected Islamist sympathiser beheaded a history teacher in a Paris suburb on Friday.
Officers are trying to find out if the attacker, who was shot dead, had acted alone or had accomplices. Local media reports said the attacker was an 18-year-old Chechen origin man.
President Emmanuel Macron termed the attack Islamic terrorism. Four relatives of the attacker, including a minor, were arrested within hours of the attack in the middle-class suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
Overnight, five others were also arrested and among them are two parents of students at the College du Bois d’Aulne where the victim was teaching.
Muslim leaders have condemned the attack, which many perceive as an attack on the essence of French statehood.
Tareq Oubrou, the imam of a Bordeaux mosque, said the incident was not a clash of civilisations.
“It is not a civilisation that kills an innocent person, it is barbarity,” Oubrou said, adding that the series of deadly attacks by Islamist militants and their sympathisers was devastating for the French Muslim community.
