French police raid dozens of targets suspected of extremism after teacher beheaded

By SHEJI HALIMA

Following the brutal murder at the end of last week of a teacher in France, numerous police operations against Islamists was ongoing on Monday.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that they were targeting dozens of people with links to radical Islam.

The police operations would continue for the coming days, he added.

In the French Defence Council, chaired by President Emmanuel Macron, it was decided on Sunday evening to take stronger action against radicalisation and also to focus more on hate speech on the internet.

The minister said that around 80 complaints against the spread of hatred on the internet had been filed since the teacher’s murder relating to news that glorified the beheading of the teacher.

The main suspect, who is 18 years old, had boasted about the killing on the internet and wrote that the educator had disparaged the prophet Mohammed.

Darmanin also announced that the operations would be focusing on a number of associations this week.

“Darmanin said that a father of a pupil at the school who had mobilised a campaign against the teacher on the internet had, together with others, issued a fatwa against the teacher.” There is no other word, Darmanin said.

In Islam, a fatwa is ruling by a recognised authority to clarify a point of religious law, but the term took on negative connotations when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death warrant on the British writer Salman Rushdie for blasphemy in 1989.

The teacher was murdered on Friday morning in a suburb of Paris. The perpetrator, who had Russian-Chechen roots, was shot dead by police.

History teacher Samuel Paty, 47, had shown controversial caricatures of Mohammed in a class on the subject of freedom of expression. (NAN)