Macron bans pro-Hamas group after founder is implicated in beheading of Samuel Paty

France has banned a pro-Hamas group active in the country after it had been accused to be directly implicated in the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in Paris the other day, as French authorities intensified their actions against alleged extremists.

President Emmanuel Macron said the Cheikh Yassine Collective, named following the founder of Hamas, would be prohibited from Wednesday. A Paris mosque that shared a denunciation of Mr Paty will also be closed.

Mr Paty was murdered by 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdulakh Anzorov following the schoolteacher showed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a class discussion about freedom of expression. Anzorov was later shot dead by police.

"This is simply not about making more statements," Mr Macron said throughout a visit to a Paris suburb. "Our fellow citizens expect actions. These actions will be stepped up."

He said he wanted to see “visible results” to combat “an ideology of destruction of the (French) Republic”.

Prime Minister Jean Castex said on Tuesday that authorities were targeting “all associations whose complicity with radical Islamism has been established”.

French police assume that at least one pupil was paid by the killer to identify his target.

Anti-terrorism and intelligence investigators have reportedly found out that Anzorov received a huge selection of euros from an unidentified source to greatly help him pay pupils to identify the teacher.

One boy of 15, among four pupils detained for questioning, has admitted acquiring money for pointing Mr Paty out. It isn't clear what, if anything, the killer told him about his intentions.

The Cheikh Yassine Collective was created by Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who has been arrested within the investigation into the attack.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said Sefrioui had helped spread a virulent message against Mr Paty prior to the beheading. The teacher has been subject to widespread hate online for showing the caricatures.

Hamas said it had no links to, or organisational relationship with, Sefrioui or his group.

A disgruntled parent who had stirred anger about Mr Paty's lesson through messages on social media had communicated on WhatsApp with Anzorov in the days before the murder.

The material he uploaded was widely shared, including by a mosque in the northern Paris suburb of Pantin, which has been closed for six months from Wednesday night.

An indicator posted by the regional prefecture at the mosque entry said the area of worship would be shut, with a six-month prison sentence for violators.

Prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old are among seven persons at first detained for questioning who appeared before an investigating magistrate today on accusations of “complicity in murder in relation with a terrorist undertaking” and “criminal conspiracy.”

“The investigation has established that the perpetrator knew the name of the teacher, the name of the institution and its own address, yet he didn't have the methods to identify him,” the prosecutor said. “That identification has only been possible by making use of students from the same school.”

“That’s why the anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office has made a decision to prosecute two under-18 minors whose implication in the identification of the victim for the killer has were conclusive,” he said.

The other suspects likewise incorporate a student’s father who posted videos on social media that needed mobilisation against the teacher and an Islamist activist who helped the person disseminate the virulent messages, which named Paty and gave the school’s address, Mr Ricard said.

Two more men, aged 18 and 19, are accused of experiencing helped the attacker by accompanying him when he bought the weapons, including a knife and an airsoft gun, which were found close to the 18-year-old’s body, in line with the prosecutor. One of these allegedly drove Anzorov 90 kilometres from the Normandy town of Evreux to near to the school around three hours before the killing.

Another 18-year-old suspect had close contacts with the attacker and endorsed radical Islamism, Mr Ricard said.

Al three, who were friends of Anzorov, allegedly said that “he was ‘radicalising’ for several months, marked by a change of behaviour, physical appearance, isolation, an assiduous frequentation of the mosque and ambiguous remarks about Jihad and the Islamic State group”.

On Wednesday evening, Mr Macron will attend the official memorial with Mr Paty's family plus some 400 guests at the Sorbonne university, posthumously giving the teacher France's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur.

Greater than a thousand people gathered on Tuesday at where Mr Paty was murdered as he left school in the northwest of Paris.

Mr Paty's beheading was the second knife attack claimed in the name of avenging Prophet Mohammed since a trial started last month over the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015, when 12 persons were gunned down for publishing cartoons of the Prophet.

Mr Macron has made sweeping proposals for combating extremism in French society, which is presented to his cabinet in December.

With his presidential term ending in 2022, he sees a need to counter claims by his main rival, the far-right Marine le Pen, that his responses to terrorism and Islamism in society are inadequate.

Doubts had been expressed about his capability to win a parliamentary majority for his anti-Islamism measures.