France: Memorial to Teacher Murdered by Islamist Vandalized 

French authorities have launched an investigation after a memorial to Samuel Paty—a French secondary school teacher who was beheaded by an Islamist terrorist—was trashed by a group of vandals. 

The prosecutor’s office in Digne-les-Bains, a French commune situated in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of southeastern France, has opened an official investigation into an incident last Thursday which, according to witnesses, saw a group of individuals use rocks to smash the glass display of the memorial, BFMTV reports.

The brazen act of vandalism comes after several memorial sites to Paty were unveiled last month to mark the first anniversary of the history teacher’s untimely death. Samuel Paty was beheaded in October 2020 by a Chechen asylum seeker in a Paris suburb after he showed cartoons of the prophet Mohammed to his class. 

Elsewhere, tributes to the murdered teacher have sparked enmity in certain sectors of the ‘French’ population as well.

Last month, during a tribute to Samuel Paty at the Jean-Zay middle school in the department of Drôme, in southeast France, an 11-year-old student yelled “Allahu Akbar.” When teachers informed the student’s father about the incident, he responded by telling school officials that he supported his son’s behavior and went on to threaten staff members.  

The situation escalated further when the father showed up at the school and threatened to burn it down. School officials called the police, who promptly showed up and arrested the 43-year-old father. According to prosecutors, police found multiple weapons, including a sword, and radical Islamic Salafist literature during a search of the man’s property.