The teacher beheaded in a Paris suburb after reportedly showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his class has been named.
Samuel Paty, 47, who taught history and geography at a school in Conflans-Saint-Honorine, was attacked on Friday evening by an 18-year-old man who was later shot dead by police.
Mr Paty is said to have shown pupils controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during a citizenship class earlier this month.
Before showing the images he reportedly advised Muslim students to leave the room if they thought they might be offended. It prompted a number of parents to demand his resignation, reports suggest.
The 18-year-old killer, born in Moscow and said to be from Chechnya, repeatedly stabbed Mr Paty after he left the school before beheading him with a large meat cleaver.
A police source said that witnesses had heard the attacker shout ‘Allahu Akbar’, or ‘God is Great’.
During a visit to the school, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters: ‘One of our fellow citizens was assassinated today because he was teaching, he was teaching pupils about freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.
‘Our compatriot was cowardly attacked, was the victim of an Islamist terrorist attack.’
He added: ‘It is not a coincidence if tonight a teacher was struck, because the terrorist wanted to attack the values of the Republic, its light, the possibility to make our children, no matter where they come from, no matter what they believe or not believe, no matter what their religion is, to make them free citizens.
‘That battle is our battle and it’s an existential one.’
More than a dozen people are standing trial in Paris accused of being accomplices in the 2015 attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published the cartoons.
The paper republished them on the eve of the trial, in an apparent show of defiance and to underscore the right of freedom of expression.
Soon afterwards, two people were wounded in a knife attack outside the satirical magazine’s former offices. The teenage attacker told police he was upset about the publication of the cartoons.
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