Following last Friday's terror attack in which a school teacher who had recently shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class was decapitated in France, a report in The Hill said that nine individuals have been taken into police custody for possible links to the incident.
According to AFP, the attacker was shot by police as they tried to arrest him and later died of his injuries.
Police source reported that officers arrived at the scene after receiving a call about a suspicious individual loitering near the school.
They found the dead man and found the suspect armed with a knife-like weapon, who threatened them as they tried to arrest him.
Officers opened fire and injured him severely, the source said. The man later died of his injuries, a judicial source said.
According to a Reuters report, investigators are attempting to find out whether the attacker, reportedly an 18-year-old of Chechen descent, was acting alone or had accomplices.
The Hill report goes on to state that one of the parents of a student in Paty’s class referred to him as a “thug," calling on others to “join forces and say ‘stop, don’t touch our children.’”
Police said that four of the alleged attacker's relatives, including a minor, have been detained following the beheading and five more arrested overnight, including two parents of students at the school where the history teacher was employed..
France's parliament suspended Friday's debate after news of the decapitation, with session president Hugues Renson, visibly moved, calling the attack "abominable".
In recent years, France has been hit by a number of attacks claimed by ISIS, the biggest one being the attack in November of 2015 in which 129 people were murdered.
The country has been under heightened alert in recent years in the wake of the attacks.
Just last month, a 25-year-old man wounded two people in a meat cleaver attack in Paris. He was subsequently charged with "attempted murder with relation to a terrorist enterprise."