Search

Pro-Hamas group ordered beheading of French teacher

Founder of pro-Hamas group arrested and investigated for involvement in slaying of teacher by radical Muslim.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

A French man who runs a pro-Hamas group is suspected of putting out an Islamic religious edict that called for the killing of a teacher at a French school who was beheaded in an Islamic terror attack.

Police in France arrested Abdelhakim Sefrioui, founder of the Sheikh Yassin organization named after the founder of the Hamas terror group.

At the beginning of October, Sefrioui accompanied the father of a pupil to the Bois d’Aulne school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine to ask for the dismissal of teacher Samuel Paty, who reportedly showed caricatures of  Muhammad to his pupils.

Sefrioui introduced himself as a “member of the Council of Imams of France” and later posted a video on YouTube in which he denounced the teacher.

Ten other people are also in custody following the gruesome murder last week, when Paty’s head was cut off by a young man who was later shot and killed by police.

On Monday, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin accused the radical Islamic activist and the student’s father of “clearly issuing a fatwa” against Samuel Paty.

In the Islamic religion, a fatwa can be a legal consultation given by a religious authority about a question or a particular issue, but this term can also be more widely used to designate a death sentence such as the 1989 fatwa issued by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the death of British author Salman Rushdie.

Read  Democratic Senator: 'Why are people criticizing Israel? They should criticize Hamas'

Sefrioui was a known Islamic radical who has been on the radar of French intelligence services for many years after participating in numerous demonstrations in support of radical Islam.

The beheading occurred only a few days after the start of the trial of 14 defendants accused of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks in France in 2015, including brutal murders of 12 people at and near the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris in which four people were murdered by an Islamic terrorist.