Police raid in France targets Islamist links after teacher’s killing
By Adam Nossiter
PARIS — As a wave of anger continued to sweep over France following the decapitation of a high school teacher, French police conducted dozens of raids Monday (19) 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.
Thousands of people took to the streets in cities around France over the weekend to demonstrate their horror at the killing 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.
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, Darmanin told Europe 1 radio.
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. Paty was attacked in the street after having shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class during a discussion about free speech.
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 re-conquest,” Le Pen said Monday. “Islamism is a bellicose ideology.”
Some 51 Muslim aid organizations will also be targeted by police this week, the interior minister said, some of which would be dissolved at Macron’s request. 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 police Friday (16) night after the killing. Also in custody is the father of a student at the school who had denounced 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 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 CCIF, which compiles a register of anti-Muslim acts. It denounced the government’s pronouncements against it on Monday as a “calumny.”
-New York Times