More than a dozen people have been detained in France after authorities conducted scores of raids in response to the beheading of a teacher.
A total of 15 people were in custody on Monday, including four students of slain middle school teacher Samuel Paty, who was decapitated on Friday by a male suspect believed to be angry that he showed his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the Times of Israel. The suspected killer, 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, was later fatally shot by responding police.
The gruesome murder stunned the country and resulted in mass demonstrations honoring Paty over the weekend. There were reportedly 40 raids across France on Monday in response to the slaying, with 20 more per day planned. In addition to the four students, investigators have also detained an Islamist radical, the father of one of Paty’s students, and four of the suspected killer’s family members.
The four students who were detained reportedly may have helped the suspect identify Paty in exchange for payment.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin claimed that the Islamist radical and the father of one of the students, neither of whom have been identified publicly, issued a “fatwa” against Paty prior to his murder by Anzorov. Darmanin pledged “not a minute’s respite for enemies of the Republic.”
Caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad have been a matter of major tension in France, as in Islam, the Prophet Muhammad’s physical appearance is not allowed to be depicted. A dozen people were killed in 2012, when gunmen shot at people in the office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper that had published cartoons of Muhammad.
