The first trial in the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty by a young jihadist opened on Monday in Paris, where six former students appeared behind closed doors in the children’s court.
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A second trial against eight adults will take place at the special jury court in Paris at the end of 2024.
The young defendants arrived in court on Monday with their faces disguised, accompanied by their parents and their lawyers.
Before them, relatives of Samuel Paty entered the room, as well as about ten of the professor’s former colleagues who want to become civil parties in the trial despite the resistance of the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office.
After a debate, the court decided to decide the matter later and allow the professors to attend the hearing, which is scheduled until December 8.
“It’s a relief, we’ve been waiting for three years to hear from our students,” one of them, a literature professor at the same college, testified outside the courtroom. Samuel Paty: “It’s our everyday life, we don’t teach at all anymore,” explains another teacher, visibly moved.
National Education has also become a citizen’s party “to reaffirm our will to defend the values of the Republic that Samuel Paty embodied,” commented Education Minister Gabriel Attal, contacted by AFP.
The attack, which took place against the background of a high terrorist threat, caused great excitement in France and abroad.
On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Paris region) by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin. The 18-year-old radicalized Islamist was immediately killed by the police.
AFP
He criticized the professor for showing cartoons of Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of expression. In an audio message in Russian, he congratulated himself on “avenging the Prophet.”
The emotions that this crime aroused were recently rekindled by the murder of another professor, Dominique Bernard, in mid-October in Arras, northern France, by a young radicalized Islamist.
Five teenagers – aged 14 and 15 at the time of Samuel Paty’s murder – are on trial for criminal conspiracy to prepare serious violence. They are accused of surveilling the college’s surroundings and naming Mr. Paty as an attacker for money.
“He is consumed by regret,” Me Antoine Ory said of his client. “He is terribly frightened and very worried that he will come face to face with Samuel Paty’s family.”
A sixth teenager, 13 years old at the time of the crime, appears on charges of defamatory denunciation. This student had falsely claimed that Mr. Paty had asked the Muslim students in the class to come forward and leave the class before they showed the cartoons of Muhammad. She hadn’t actually taken this course.
His lie was the origin of a violent campaign on social networks fueled by his father Brahim Chnina and Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui, the author of videos that brought attention to the professor.
These two men will be tried in the second trial.
“Corridor”
For Samuel Paty’s family, this first process is “fundamental.” “The role of minors is crucial in the spiral that led to the murder of the professor,” says Me Virginie Le Roy, who represents his parents and one of his sisters.
“It is not surprising that the defense will plead youthful error,” but this trial will be “highly anticipated for those who want to understand the true causes that led these schoolboys down the path to the irretrievable,” Louis explained Cailliez, lawyer, before the opening of the trial for Mickaëlle Paty, one of the sisters of the murdered professor.
The investigation chronicled how Samuel Paty trapped himself over a ten-day period: from the student’s lie, to the online attacks, to the attacker’s arrival outside the school on October 16.
“Hey boy, come and see, I have something to offer you,” Abdoullakh Anzorov said to a teenager, offering him 300 euros to identify Mr Paty, whom the attacker allegedly wanted to “film to apologize”.
The student “brows” and passes on the suggestion without “feeling like he is doing it alone.” Four others joined him, according to witness statements cited in the order of the investigative judges consulted by AFP.
Some shuttle back and forth between the college and Anzorov’s “hideout,” keeping watch or filming themselves with tickets.
The attacker asks one of them to call the teenager who started the affair. She repeats her lie, not knowing he was listening, she assures.
During the audition, during which they burst into tears, the college students swore that they had imagined that the professor would at most be “exposed on the networks,” perhaps “humiliated,” “beaten”… but that it would “never” go “until death”.
At the end of the lesson, Samuel Paty is referred to by the young people: “He’s here.” He is murdered shortly before 5 p.m.
The teenagers are now high school students. You face two and a half years in prison.