Police swoop on Islamist groups Photograph:( AFP )
Tens of thousands of people took part in rallies countrywide to honour teacher Samuel Paty and defend freedom of expression, including the right to show cartoons regarded by many Muslims as insulting.
French police Monday raided radical Islamist groups in the aftermath of the beheading of a history teacher who had shown his pupils satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
Tens of thousands of people took part in rallies countrywide to honour teacher Samuel Paty and defend freedom of expression, including the right to show cartoons regarded by many Muslims as insulting.
The swoop on Islamist networks is reported to have been designed to send a message that "enemies of the Republic" would not enjoy "a minute's respite".
Sources said individuals targetted in the police operation were known to the police for radical preachings or hate speech on social media.
The government is also likely to tighten the noose on NGOs with links to Islamist networks, including the high-profile Anti-Islamophobia Collective.
"Islamists should not be allowed sleep soundly in our country," President Emmanuel Macron told a meeting of key ministers Sunday to discuss a response to the attack.
The attack has drawn parallels with the 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, where 12 people, including several cartoonists, were gunned down for publishing images of the prophet.
That attack -- the first in a string of assaults that have killed over 240 people in France -- brought over a million people onto the streets of Paris to denounce extremism.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered on his way home from the school where he taught in a suburb northwest of Paris on Friday afternoon.
A photo of the teacher and a message confessing to his murder was found on the mobile phone of his killer, an 18-year-old Chechen man Abdullakh Anzorov, who was shot dead by police.
Anzorov's family from the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya arrived in France to seek asylum when he was six.
Four members of his family are being held for questioning.
They are among 11 people being held over the attack, including a known Islamist militant and the father of one of Paty's pupils who had railed against him online and called for his dismissal.
The two men had issued a "fatwa" against Paty, using the term for an Islamic edict that was famously used to describe the 1989 death sentence handed down against writer Salman Rushdie by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.
Paty, who was praised by pupils and parents as a dedicated teacher, had shown the Mohammed cartoons to his civics class.
Friday's attack was the second of its kind since a trial started last month over the Charlie Hebdo killings.
The magazine republished the controversial cartoons in the run-up to the trial, and last month a young Pakistani man wounded two people with a meat cleaver outside Charlie Hebdo's former office.
(with inputs)