Court Approves Closure of Controversial Paris No-Go Suburb Mosque

A French court has approved the six-month closure of the Pantin mosque in Paris’s no-go suburbs after its members were accused of spreading messages that led to a radical Islamic terrorist murdering teacher Samuel Paty.

The administrative court in Montreuil approved a government move to close the controversial mosque for six months last week after it shared a video on Facebook of the father of a student at the school where Mr Paty taught.

The video in question called for action against the teacher after he had shown his class cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed during a lesson on free speech. The man behind the video, Brahim Chnina, was said to have been in direct contact with 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoulakh Anzorov before he beheaded Paty on October 16th.

According to a report from 20Minutes from Tuesday, the head of the Pantin mosque, M’hammed Henniche, expressed deep regret about the terrorist attack and labelled it a “despicable crime” at the hearing.

The court accused those in charge of the mosque and its Facebook page of showing “incomprehensible negligence” and stated they should have had “more restraint”.

“This dissemination is also part of a context of the entryism of the radical movement within the Grand Mosque of Pantin,” the court stated. The body noted that Ibrahim Doucouré, also known as Abu Talha, an imam at the mosque, was connected to radical Islamist groups in the Paris region.

On Sunday, the imam had announced that he was “withdrawing from his activities” at the mosque which is frequented by around 1,300 Muslim worshippers.

The closure of the mosque comes after President Emmanuel Macron’s government has vowed to shut down many Islamist-linked groups including the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).

The CCIF, which has been funded by Hungarian-American leftist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, claims to combat “Islamophobia” and was involved in overturning bans on the Islamic swimwear known as the burkini in 2016.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com