France closes Paris mosque in clampdown over teacher’s beheading

French authorities announced Tuesday they would shut down a Paris mosque as part of a clampdown on radical Islam that has produced over a dozen arrests following the beheading of a teacher who had shown his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.

The mosque in a densely-populated suburb northeast of Paris had distributed a video on its Facebook page days before Friday’s gruesome murder, railing against teacher Samuel Paty’s choice of material for a class discussion on freedom of expression, said a source close to the investigation.

The interior ministry announced the mosque in Pantin, which has some 1,500 worshippers, would be shut on Wednesday night for six months.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who vowed Monday there would be “not a minute’s respite for enemies of the Republic”, had asked regional authorities to carry out the mosque closure. And on Monday, police launched a series of raids targeting Islamist networks.