French Teacher Beheading: Samuel Paty’s Killer Was in ‘Contact’ With Jihadist in Syria

Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday reported that Anzorov's suspected contact had been located through an IP address traced back to Idlib, a jihadist holdout in northwestern Syria.

New Delhi: The killer who beheaded French history teacher Samuel Paty for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class, had contact with a jihadist in Syria, according to reports.

Seven persons have been charged with being complicit in a “terrorist murder” after 18-year-old Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov decapitated Paty on the outskirts of Paris on Friday. These include two teenagers who helped him identify the teacher in return for 300-350 euros.

Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday reported that Anzorov’s suspected contact had been located through an IP address traced back to Idlib, a jihadist holdout in northwestern Syria.

The identity of the jihadi in Syria has not yet been established, reported news agency AFP.

France paid homage to Paty on Wednesday, with President Emmanuel Macron saying that the history and geography teacher had been slain by “cowards” for representing the secular, democratic values of the French Republic.

“Islamists want to take our future,” Macron said, adding, “They will never have it.”

Prime Minister Jean Castex said, “Secularism, the backbone of the French Republic, was targeted in this vile act.”

Paty, 47, became the target of an online hate campaign over his choice of lesson material — the same images which unleashed a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.

Police have carried out dozens of raids since the crime, while the government has ordered the six-month closure of a mosque outside Paris and dissolved the Sheikh Yassin Collective, a group they said supported Hamas.

The French government has also earmarked for dissolution more than 50 other organisations accusing them of having links to radical Islam.

Paty’s beheading was the second knife attack in the name of avenging the Prophet Mohammed since a trial of alleged accomplices in the Charlie Hebdo attack started last month.