PARIS, October 17. /TASS/. Russia’s embassy to Paris has asked the French authorities for information on the man who killed a teacher in a Paris suburb on Friday evening, Sergei Parinov, a spokesman for the Russian embassy, told TASS.
"As of now, we have no information about the citizenship of the suspect in the crime," the diplomat said. "We have submitted relevant requests to profile French agencies."
It was reported in recent hours that an 18-year-old foreign citizen of Chechen descent committed the attack in Conflans Sainte-Honorine, a suburb north-west of Paris.
On Friday afternoon, at about 17.00 Paris time, a teacher was attacked outside the school in Conflans Sainte-Honorine. His throat was slit with a kitchen knife. The assailant tried to threaten police officers who arrived at the scene but was shot dead.
Controversial information is immediately available about the attacker. It was earlier reported that the suspect is a 48-year-old man of Algerian descent, but later he was said to be an 18-year-old foreign citizen of Chechen descent. It is still unclear whether he had been brought to the attention of law enforcement agencies before.
According to police, the attacker was armed with a knife, but a rifle was also found by his side. A bomb squad did not find explosives on his body. France’s anti-terror prosecutor is investigating the attack.
The investigators said that the teacher’s last class on the freedom of expression could have triggered the attack as he was showing caricatures of Prophet Muhammad to his students then.