French President Emmanuel Macron has said that a Hamas-linked Muslim group connected with the beheading of a teacher in Paris will be disbanded. Macron also promised to take “concrete actions” against radical Islamist terrorism.
“We know what needs to be done,” the president told reporters in Paris on Tuesday, announcing that a Muslim group connected to Palestinian Hamas militants would be broken up. The group is believed to be linked to the beheading of history teacher Samuel Paty by a teenage Chechen refugee last week. Prior to the killing, Paty had shown his class a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed.
The shocking murder triggered a public outcry in France, and police on Monday raided dozens of targets suspected of Islamist extremism.
“These acts will intensify,” Macron said on Tuesday, promising more “concrete actions” against “the evil that is radical Islam.”
Macron spoke following a meeting with anti-terrorism police in the Paris suburb of Bobigny. His country’s struggle with radical Islam predates last week’s beheading, however. Last month, the court trial of three men accused of aiding the 2017 terrorist attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo began in Paris. Within days of the trial’s commencement, a teenage Pakistani stabbed two television employees with a meat cleaver outside the magazine’s former headquarters.
The attacker apparently wanted to burn the magazine’s building to the ground, but was unaware it had since relocated, prosecutors said.
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