French rally in support of free speech after teacher beheading

Thousands attend marches to honour Samuel Paty following killing on Friday

A rally in defence of free speech is held in Paris, France
(Image credit: Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)

Tens of thousands of people joined rallies in cities across France this weekend to pay tribute to a teacher murdered in Paris last week after showing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed to his pupils.

Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history teacher, was decapitated outside his secondary school in a northwestern suburb of the capital on Friday, in what President Emmanuel Macron has described as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. The knife-wielding killer - named as Abdullah Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian-born man of Chechen descent - was shot dead by police after attacking officers called to the scene.

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.