French schools hold minute of silence for beheaded teacher

PARIS — French schools hold a nationwide minute of silence in honor of a teacher who was beheaded for opening a class debate on free speech by showing students caricatures of the prophet of Islam.

Invoking France’s cherished rights of expression and secularism, officials recall the country’s Enlightenment past as they urged students and teachers alike to look to the future.

Samuel Paty was killed on October 16 outside his school in suburban Paris by an 18-year-old refugee of Chechen origin to punish him for showing the caricatures published by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which triggered a newsroom massacre by extremists in January 2015.

Since their re-publication in September at the start of the ongoing Paris trial over the killings, France has endured three attacks blamed on Muslim extremists: one by a Pakistani refugee that injured two people outside the newspaper’s old headquarters, the slaying of the schoolteacher, and a deadly knife attack last Thursday in a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice. France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor has opened investigations into all three, and France is now at its highest level of alert.

“Samuel Paty taught each child of the Republic to become a free citizen. For him, for our country, we will continue. It is our honor and our duty,” French Prime Minister Jean Castex writes in a tweet.

French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to increase protection of schools and churches immediately after the Nice attack, more than doubling the number of soldiers actively deployed in the country. Paty was killed at the beginning of a two-week French school holiday that saw the country declare two states of emergency: one for security and the other for health.

— AP