(AFP) French police said they were holding a man on Friday for threatening a school principal who turned away his daughter for wearing a traditional Muslim abaya robe.
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.
