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Father held in France for making death threats over abaya ban

French police said it was holding a man on Friday for threatening a school principal who turned away his daughter for wearing a traditional Muslim abaya dress.

Father held in France for making death threats over abaya ban
French police handcuffs displayed on the ground in Paris (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY / AFP)

President Emmanuel Macron’s government announced last month it was banning the abaya — a garment worn by Muslim women that covers the body from the neck to the feet — in schools, as it broke the rules on secularism in education.

The man, arrested Thursday, was being prosecuted for “issuing threats designed to intimidate a person charged with an official mission”, the local prosecutor Dominique Puechmaille told AFP.

The man’s daughter was stopped at the entrance of her high school on Thursday and asked to remove her abaya. When she refused, she was stopped from entering, police said.

Her father then telephoned the school and spoke first to a guard and then to an educational advisor. He is accused of having issued death threats targeting the school principal in both conversations.

French Education Minister Gabriel Attal called the threats “intolerable and unspeakable”.

The principal was now under police protection, he said.

The president of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, added that the school staff had received threats “of death and decapitation”.

The authorities had to show “firmness and determination” in the face of such threats.

Court rejected challenge

The ban was quickly challenged before France’s State Council, the highest administrative court, by an association arguing the ban could incite hatred against Muslims and racial profiling.

On Thursday however, the court threw out the complaint.

Wearing the abaya “follows the logic of religious affirmation”, said the ruling, adding that the decision was based on French law, which does not allow anyone wearing visible signs of any religious affiliation in schools.

The government ban did not, it said, cause “serious or obviously illegal harm to the respect for personal lives, freedom of religion, the right to education, the well-being of children or the principle of non-discrimination”.

A US government advisory panel on Friday condemned France’s ban, saying the restriction was meant to “intimidate” the country’s Muslim minority.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom is tasked with making recommendations to the US government but does not set policy itself.

The commission’s chair, Abraham Cooper, called the abaya ban a “misguided effort to promote the French value of laicite,” the country’s official secularism.

“France continues to wield a specific interpretation of secularism to target and intimidate religious groups, particularly Muslims,” Cooper said.

“While no government should use its authority to impose a specific religion on its population, it is equally condemnable to restrict the peaceful practice of individuals’ religious beliefs to promote secularism.”

On the first day of the school year on Monday, French schools sent dozens of girls home for refusing to remove their abayas — a shoulder-to-toe over-garment.

Nearly 300 schoolgirls defied the ban on that day, Attal said. Most agreed to change garments but 67 refused and were sent home, he said.

Around 10 percent of France’s 67 million inhabitants are Muslim, according to official estimates.

Most have origins in the northern African countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, which were French colonies until the second half of the 20th century.

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CRIME

Teens charged in France over plot to attack Jewish targets: judicial source

French prosecutors have charged a 19-year-old man and a youth in the Paris region with planning a "terrorist" attack on Jewish targets, a judicial source told AFP on Friday.

Teens charged in France over plot to attack Jewish targets: judicial source

While no details on the pair have been released, French anti-terrorist investigators have expressed increased concern over the young age of some suspects detained in recent months for planning militant attacks.

The 19-year-old has been charged with “terrorist conspiracy” to commit attacks and the “acquisition and possession of arms for a terrorist enterprise,” said the judicial source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

READ ALSO: Anti-Semitism fears stalk Jewish voters’ choice in France

The youth aged under 18 was detained on June 13, the source said.

The pair made contact on social media and were planning a “a violent action notably aiming at Jewish targets,” said the source without giving details on the plot.

Anti-terrorism investigators say a growing number of youths have been held in recent months for preparing attacks.

READ ALSO: French election breakdown: TV debates, polling latest and anti-Semitism

“This is a necessarily worrying phenomenon,” senior anti-terrorist prosecutor Olivier Christen said at an evidentiary hearing on Wednesday.

French politicians have also condemned a growing number of attacks on the country’s Jewish community, the biggest outside Israel and the United States.

Outrage has been expressed over the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in a park in the Paris suburbs last Saturday. Two 13-year-old boys have been charged with rape and making anti-Semitic insults.

Several protest rallies have been held in Paris and other French cities over the case which comes as France prepares for a national election in which the far-right National Rally party is tipped to make major gains. 

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