The French administration is to carry out a review to determine which foreigners with a record of radicalism can be expelled from the country.
Just three days after the murder of a teacher in the northeastern city of Arras, stabbed to death by a former student with a record of Islamic radicalisation, France has raised its anti-terrorism alert to the highest level.
At the request of President Emmanuel Macron, the French administration is to carry out a review to determine which foreigners with a record of radicalism can be expelled from the country.
The Elysée has asked local authorities to check the files of radicalised people drawn up by the secret services to ensure that there are no “oversights” in their expulsion procedure.
They have 48 hours to examine in detail all the cases of people suspected of being radicalised.
Macron wants the state to be “implacable against all those who support hatred and terrorist ideologies”, an advisor told French media.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, has also instructed authorities to pay particular attention to young people from the Caucasus.
The government has said it is not trying to stigmatise any community, but both the attacker who killed the teacher and the murderer of Samuel Paty – the teacher beheaded by an Islamist three years ago – were from the region.
Darmanin has indicated that he will resume talks with Russia to organise these expulsions, which have been interrupted by the war in Ukraine.
“There are about sixty dossiers of Russian citizens. Among them are people from Chechnya. The instruction we had until now was to systematically expel these people who could be particularly dangerous,” the interior minister told the media.
Islamist terrorism strikes France
Police say the killer of the teacher Dominique Bernard last Friday in a secondary school in the city of Arras is Mohamed Mogouchkov.
A 20-year-old Russian national born in the Republic of Ingushetia, he came to France with his family as a child in 2008.
In 2014, he was the subject of a deportation procedure that was never carried out.
The father of the family was deported four years later for links to Islamist extremism, while the eldest son is imprisoned in France for involvement in the preparation of a terrorist attack.
Mohamed Mogouchkov himself had been under surveillance for several weeks by the secret services, who suspected him of being close to Islamic fundamentalism.__Courtesy EuroNews
