A schoolteacher was decapitated in France on Friday after allegedly showing students a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, France's anti-terror prosecutor's office revealed. As CNN reports, the victim's body was found in the Parisian suburb of Éragny-sur-Oise, which is just northwest of the capital. The perpetrator of the attack was later shot dead by police in the same area.
The teacher worked at a secondary school in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine region, and they allegedly recently showed images that depicted the Prophet Mohammed. After the images were shown to the students, some parents complained to the school.
The teacher made the decision to show the controversial images when discussing the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, in which two al-Qaeda gunmen killed 12 and injured 11 employees of the satirical magazine after it had continued to depict the Prophet Mohammed in various cartoons. Prior to the said attack, the magazine's offices were struck by a gasoline bomb in 2011.
Despite the complaints from parents, the teacher allegedly informed Muslim children to leave before showing the images. "My son told me that it was just to preserve them, it was out of pure kindness, because he had to show a caricature of the prophet of Islam and simply said to the Muslim children: 'Go out, I don't want it to hurt your feelings,' that's what my son told me," said Nordine Chaouadi, a parent of a student who attends the school.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited the scene of the crime, said the teacher was victim to an "Islamist attack." Macron added that the teacher had been "killed because he was teaching students freedom of speech, the freedom to believe and not believe." Police have yet to provide further details of the incident, which they have labeled a terrorist attack.
