The French public is still reeling from the shocking murder of school teacher Samuel Paty in a Parisian suburb last week who had been beheaded by a Chechen Islamist. Chems Akrouf, an expert on issues of extremism and radicalisation in France, talked to N1 Television's Ivana Dragicevic on Thursday about the reactions to the murder and the political and social reverberations the incident caused in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron awarded Paty the country’s highest state decoration, the Legion of Honor, in a ceremony on Wednesday, saying that Paty was slain for “representing the secular, democratic values of France.”

The issue of radicalisation in secular France is one of the key topics in local politics as well as a major issue in social relations. Mr Akrouf, who currently runs a pilot de-radicalisation project in Argenteuil, another suburb of Paris some 12 kilometres east of the location of Paty’s murder, talked to Dragicevic on Thursday about the reactions the murder caused in France and his project.