VERSAILLES, France: A school in France will be named after Samuel Paty, a teacher who worked there until he was murdered by a militant for discussing Prophet Muhammad drawings in class, local authorities said after a unanimous vote in favor of the change.
Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on October 16, 2020 in an attack that horrified France.
Paty’s attacker, 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead at the scene by police.
He murdered Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“By naming the Bois d’Aulne school Samuel Paty College, we incarnate the French ideal, the republican hope that knowledge brings progress, by giving it the face of a humble, devoted and enthusiastic man, the face of Samuel Paty,” said Pierre Bedier, president of the Yvelines department where the school is located.
New name plates would be put up in the course of the current school year, his office added.
Some parents’ associations had called for the name change to be delayed, arguing that children who were deeply shocked by the 2020 events could be traumatized all over again by revisiting those memories.
They wanted the change to be delayed until after mid-2025 when all pupils who knew Paty personally will have left the establishment, to no avail.
The children “had to live through something unimaginable,” they said in a message to the town’s mayor.
Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.

SEOUL: North Korea has shipped 1,500 special forces troops to Russia’s far east for training and acclimatizing at local military bases and will likely be deployed for combat in the war in Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency said on Friday.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) also said it had been working with Ukrainian intelligence service and had used facial recognition artificial intelligence technology to identify North Korean officers in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region supporting Russian forces firing North Korean missiles.
In more than 13,000 containers, North Korea has shipped artillery rounds, ballistic missiles and anti-tank rockets to Russia since August last year, the agency said, based on the remnants of weapons recovered from the battle front in Ukraine.
In all, more than eight million artillery and rocket rounds have been shipped to Russia, it said.
“The direct military cooperation between Russia and North Korea that has been reported by foreign media has now been officially confirmed,” the spy agency said in a statement.
Earlier, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called an unscheduled security meeting with key intelligence, military and national security officials to discuss North Korean troops’ involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Yoon’s office said.
“The participants ... shared the view that the current situation where Russia and North Korea’s closer ties have gone beyond the movement of military supplies to actual dispatch of troops is a grave security threat not only to our country but to the international community,” it said.
Yoon’s office said South Korea, together with its allies, has been closely tracking North Korea’s troop dispatch to Russia from the initial stages.
South Korea will respond to the North’s activities with all available means, it added, without elaborating on what actions it might take.
South Korea, which has emerged as a major global arms exporter, selling fighter jets, mechanized howitzers and missiles, has come under pressure from some Western allies including Washington to help arm Ukraine with lethal weapons but has stopped short of openly doing so.
Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College in London said despite the gravity of the development, it may not be heavy enough to shift Seoul’s position.
“When it comes to South Korea, I think that its red line is Russia providing support to North Korea that allows Pyongyang to substantially improve its nuclear and missile program, not North Korea’s support for Russia.”
RUSSIAN UNIFORMS, FAKE IDS
Vessels belonging to Russia’s Pacific Fleet were detected moving about 1,500 North Korean special forces troops to Vladivostok from Oct. 8 to 13 and are expected to resume the shipment of troops soon, the NIS said.
The troops have been supplied with Russian military uniforms and weapons as well as fake identification documents for when they are deployed for combat, the NIS added.
The agency said it used facial recognition AI to identify with a high degree of accuracy technical military officers from the North Korean military in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine where they are supporting Russia’s missile offensive and helping with technical glitches.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused North Korea on Thursday of deploying officers alongside Russia and preparing to send 10,000 soldiers to help Moscow’s war effort, although NATO’s chief Mark Rutte said there was no evidence of Pyongyang’s presence at this stage.
Since their leaders’ summit in the Russian far east last year, North Korea and Russia have dramatically upgraded their military ties and they met again in June to sign a comprehensive strategic partnership that includes a mutual defense pact.
Russia and North Korea both deny they have engaged in arms transfers. The Kremlin has also dismissed South Korean assertions that North Korea may have sent some military personnel to help Russia against Ukraine.
North Korea has 1.28 million active duty troops, according to South Korea’s latest data, and has stepped up its development of a series of ballistic missiles and a nuclear arsenal, fueling regional tension and drawing international sanctions.
Deploying troops to Russia, if confirmed, would be its first major involvement in a war since the 1950-53 Korean War.
North Korea reportedly sent a much smaller contingent to the Vietnam War and to the civil conflict in Syria.