Conflans-Sainte-Honorine is usually a sleepy suburb of Paris. Since last Friday (16 October), however, there is a swarm of activity around the high school Bois d’Aulne. Police and gendarmes stand watch, international media are reporting live and in the middle of all this – the grieving residents.
“It’s incredibly dramatic. My grandchildren are pupils at the school and my daughter is a teacher, so this a shock for all of us,” Marie-Noëlle Nicolas says, who has come with her husband Patrick to honour the slain teacher, Samuel Paty.
On Friday, the history and geography teacher Paty left the school to take autumn leave. Instead, he was met by an 18-year-old who stabbed and killed him, finally beheading him.
Shortly after, a photo of the horror was posted on social media with a macabre message: “To Macron, the leader of the unfaithful, now I have executed one of your hell dogs.”
Police later shot the teenage perpetrator dead – a Moscow-born youth of Chechen origin living in Evreux, some 100km away. He had come to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine with the sole purpose of killing Paty.
Some weeks before, Paty had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics class on freedom of expression – the same cartoons that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten were previously attacked for.
Paty is however said to have let pupils choose whether they wanted to see the cartoons or not.
