Eight people have gone on trial in Paris for their alleged role in events leading to the beheading of the history teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, in a case that horrified France and heightened fears of terrorist attacks on schools.
Paty, a 47-year-old history teacher, was stabbed and then decapitated near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a radicalised 18-year-old who arrived in France aged six with his Chechen parents and had been granted asylum.
Anzorov, who was shot dead at the scene by police, killed Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Seven men and one woman appeared in Paris’s special criminal court on Monday. They included friends of Anzorov who are accused of helping purchase weapons for the attack, as well as people who are accused of spreading false information online about the teacher and his class, contributing to a climate of hatred before the attack.
Brahim Chnina, a 52-year-old Moroccan man who worked in transport for people with disabilities, appeared in court after spending four years in jail on remand. He is the father of a schoolgirl in Paty’s class who was aged 13 at the time of the attack and is central to the case. She claimed Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. The claim was false and she later told investigators that she was not in the classroom that day.
Chnina’s daughter was last year convicted for making false allegations and given an 18-month suspended prison sentence in a trial held behind closed doors in the juvenile court, without the media present.
Chnina, alongside another defendant, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, is accused of launching an online campaign against Paty. According to the prosecution, the two men spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim of “designating a target”, “provoking a feeling of hatred” and “thus preparing several crimes”. They are being tried for participation in a criminal terrorist act, a crime punishable by 30 years in jail.
Paty is now regarded as a hero of free speech by the French authorities and his school is being renamed after him. He had made references to Charlie Hebdo magazine and cartoons of the prophet as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, which included a class debate. Paty told students beforehand that they were not obliged to look at the cartoons if they did not want to.
Weeks before the class, Charlie Hebdo had republished the cartoons. The magazine had first published the images in 2012. In 2015, radicalised gunmen stormed its Paris office, killing 11 people inside, and a police officer outside, in coordinated terrorist attacks that also resulted in a second police officer being killed and four hostages murdered at a kosher supermarket.
Two young friends of Paty’s attacker, Anzorov, appeared in court facing charges of “complicity in terrorist murder”, a crime punishable by life imprisonment. Naim Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, a Russian of Chechen origin, are accused of having accompanied Anzorov to a knife shop in the northern city of Rouen the day before the attack. Their lawyers have denied they had any “complicity” in the crime.
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Five other teenagers, who had been aged between 14 and 15 at the time, were found guilty of criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence in a trial at the juvenile court last year.
They were found guilty of having helped point out Paty to Anzorov when he asked who the teacher was. They said they never thought it would lead to his murder. Four were given suspended sentences.
The trial, heard by a panel of judges, runs until 20 December.
