PARIS • French police yesterday raided Islamic associations and groups of foreigners suspected of extremist religious beliefs, sources said, three days after a suspected Islamist beheaded a school teacher.
History teacher Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered last 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 Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression to 13-year-olds.
Muslims believe any depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous.
Public figures have 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 watch list and suspected of holding extreme religious beliefs.
About 150 of the 213 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 following Mr Paty's killing.
Among them, prosecutors said, were the father of a student at Mr Paty's school and another person on the radar of intelligence services, who they said had used social media to campaign against the teacher.
A judicial source told Reuters the man known to the intelligence agencies was Moroccan-born Abdelhakim Sefriuoi. It is said that he has for years used social media to fight against what he calls "Islamaphobia" and to put pressure on the French 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 watch list for more than 15 years, security sources told Reuters.
Mr Darmanin said the two men's calls for action against Mr Paty served as a fatwa against him.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people rallied in Paris and cities across France on Sunday to pay tribute to Mr Paty.
Demonstrators at the Place de la Republique in the French capital held aloft posters declaring: "No to totalitarianism of thought" and "I am a teacher" in memory of the murdered teacher.
"You do not scare us. We are not afraid. You will not divide us. We are France!" tweeted Prime Minister Jean Castex, who joined the Paris demonstration. Politicians from the other major parties also attended the event.
REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
