Emmanuel Macron is to posthumously award Samuel Paty, a teacher killed by a suspected Islamist, with the Legion of Honor. Hundreds are expected to attend a ceremony devoted to Paty at the Sorbonne University.

French mourners are expected to honor the schoolteacher beheaded by a suspected Islamist last week, at a national ceremony at the Sorbonne University in Paris on Wednesday.

President Emmanuel Macron is to posthumously award the 47-year-old history teacher Samuel Paty the Legion of Honor, France's highest civil distinction, during the ceremony. Paty was killed last week after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson on free speech.

Prosecutors and political leaders have linked the gruesome murder to the lesson, which he had held several weeks earlier.

Macron is expected to attend the memorial on Wednesday evening, with Paty's family and around 400 guests.

Seven people, including two pupils, will testify before an anti-terror judge for a decision on criminal charges over Paty's killing on Friday.

Meanwhile, nine of 16 people held over the murder were released from custody late Tuesday, including four members of the killer's family and three students.

Police have carried out several raids since the killing, while the government has ordered a mosque outside Paris closed for six months, and plans to dissolve a group it said supported Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Macron announced that the pro-Hamas group, the Sheikh Yassin Collective, would be dissolved for being "directly implicated" in the murder. Paty's killing sparked an outcry across France, with public figures calling he murder an attack on French values.

Paty was attacked shortly after leaving the junior high school, where he taught in a suburb outside of Paris. Prosecutors said the attacker had approached students outside the school and asked them to identify Paty as he left for his home.

He became the target of an online hate campaign after he showed students the same controversial images of the Prophet Mohamed that sparked a violent attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo five years ago.

Investigators found a photo of the teacher and a message claiming responsibility for his killing on the cellphone of his killer, an 18-year-old originally from the Russian region of Chechnya. He also tweeted images of the teacher's decapitated body before he was shot dead by police.