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Police Raid in France Targets Islamist Links After Teacher’s Killing Police Raids in France Target Islamist Links After Teacher’s Killing
(about 4 hours later)
PARIS — The French police are conducting dozens of raids targeting individuals associated with radical Islamists following the decapitation of a teacher on the street last week, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said Monday on Europe 1 radio. PARIS — As a wave of anger continued to sweep over France following the decapitation of a high school teacher, the French police conducted dozens of raids on Monday targeting individuals associated with radical Islamists, and the government vowed to shut down Muslim aid organizations and expel dozens of foreign nationals for showing signs of radicalism.
The police operations, which began Monday morning, are focusing on people already in police files because the French security services say they have shown “signals” of radicalization, like sharing sermons and messages on social networks, Mr. Darmanin said. Thousands of people took to the streets in cities around France over the weekend to demonstrate their horror at the killing on Friday, and politicians, especially on the right, jostled to sound the alarm against “the enemy within,” as Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin put it in a radio interview, referring to the country’s radicalized Muslims.
Some 50 Muslim aid organizations will also be targeted by the police this week, the minister said, and that some would be dissolved. The operations by the police that began early Monday were focusing on people already in their files — those the security services say have shown “signals” of radicalization, like preaching radicalized sermons, or sharing hate messages on social networks, Mr. Darmanin told Europe 1 radio.
The police actions are part of a broader reaction in France, including by the government, to the killing on Friday of a high school teacher, Samuel Paty, by a young Chechen immigrant for having shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class as part of a discussion on free speech. As much as the Charlie Hebdo killings of 2015, the murder of Samuel Paty, a teacher in a suburb north of Paris, has struck deep inside the French psyche as an assault on a principal pillar of the French republic — the secular public school system. Mr. Paty was attacked in the street after having shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class during a discussion about free speech.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across France on Sunday to protest the killing and show solidarity with Mr. Paty. The government, pressed by President Emmanuel Macron’s likely leading challenger in 2022, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, stepped up the pressure Monday on French Muslims and Muslim organizations identified as radicalized by the security services. “This situation calls for a strategy of reconquest,” Ms. Le Pen said Monday. “Islamism is a bellicose ideology.”
Some 51 Muslim aid organizations will also be targeted by the police this week, the interior minister said, some of which would be dissolved at Mr. Macron’s request. Mr. Darmanin called one “an enemy of the republic.”
Already, 11 people have been arrested, including family members of the suspect, an 18-year-old Chechen refugee named Abdullakh Anzorov, who was shot dead by the police Friday night after the killing. Also in custody is the father of a student at the school who had denounced Mr. Paty online for showing the caricatures, and demanded his dismissal. The video circulated widely and may have been seen by the killer.
The interior minister also announced on Monday the expulsion of 231 foreign citizens identified for their radicalism, including 180 who were already in prison. Those not imprisoned would soon be arrested, officials said.
One of the government’s primary targets is the best-known of France’s Muslim aid organizations, the Collective Against Islamophobia, the C.C.I.F., which compiles a register of anti-Muslim acts. It denounced the government’s pronouncements against it on Monday as a “calumny.”