Uproar in France after school chief quits in hijab row

PARIS: PM Gabriel Attal on Wednesday defended French secularism following the resignation of a Paris school principal who received death threats after asking a student to remove her Muslim veil on the premises. Attal, a former education minister, said the state would be filing a complaint against the student over falsely accusing the headmaster of mistreatment during the incident in Feb."The state... will always stand with these officials, those who are on the frontline faced with these breaches of secularism, these attempts of Islamist entryism in our education establishments," he said on the TF1 television channel. Attal told TF1 the headmaster had been supposed to retire in June, and decided to leave a little earlier. The student told French daily Le Parisien that she had been "hit hard on the arm" by the headmaster. But the Paris prosecutor's office on Wednesday said that her complaint had been dismissed.