In southeastern France’s Albertville commune, three Turkish children and a child from North Africa, who are all 10 years old, were taken to a police station, Anadolu Agency reported Friday.
In order to allegedly determine whether or not they have any tendency to be radicalized, the children were interrogated for 11 hours at the station.
A father of one of the children told the Turkish outlet that the French police raided his house in the early morning.
“Before 7 a.m. in the morning, 10 police officers with masks tapped the door loudly and infiltrated into the house with long-barreled weapons in their hands. They have taken the photos of the adornments on the wall. They examined the entire house in an effort to obtain a clue. Then, they asked us to come to the station and take our children back later on,” the Turkish father said.
“When we went to the station, they asked us questions about our religious beliefs and what we think of the tension between (French President Emmanuel) Macron and (Turkish President Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan. Everyone knows our family. The school (that the children go to) knows our family very well. We have other children that go to the same school. If they had any direction toward radicalization, everyone would have known that” he continued.
“In the same way as in the morning, they clearly desired to terrorize us with the noise and the excessive violence. I do not understand: 10 hyper-armed police officers, trying to, it seems, breaks our door, to come and get my 10-year-old daughter still asleep.”
According to the father worried about his daughter detained for 11 hours, this operation “disproportionately aggressive and notably frightening” of police would be due to questions or remarks made the day before by the four primary school pupils, following a discussion in the class about the gloomy cartoons about Prophet Muhammad of Islam and the murder of Samuel Paty, the teacher who showed blasphemous cartoons in his class.
“My daughter might have made a remark on the murder of the professor,” explained the father, recalling that his child is only 10 years old and that “she does not know any of that.”
“These are not topics we talk about at home,” he said, adding that “everyone knows our family. The school knows us very well; we had several children who went to the same school. If there was a concern of radicalization with us, everyone would know.”
The Albertville police told Anadolu Agency that they could not give information on the detention of the four children.
The parents interviewed by Anadolu Agency also noted that the police refused to provide them with a document relating to the reason for the detention of their child; or the interrogation to which they were subjected.
According to the father, two of the four children taken by the police were transported to Chambery, an Alpine town in southeastern France. He did not know which service took care of these two children.
The school where the incident took place did not respond to Anadolu Agency’s request for comments.
(Anadolu Agency)
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