Two years after the tragedy that shocked all of France, the investigations into the assassination of Samuel Paty are over. The anti-terrorism investigating judges closed their investigations on Thursday, as France prepares for the commemorations of the death of the teacher, killed by a radicalized young man quickly neutralized by the police. The magistrates informed the parties of the end of this judicial investigation in which 14 people are being prosecuted, indicated a judicial source.
The parties now have one month to send the judges their observations. If the investigations are not relaunched, it will then be up to the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) to make its final indictment, i.e. to declare who it wishes to see tried, or not, before which jurisdiction and for which counts, before a final decision by the investigating judges.
A claimed gesture
On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old history and geography professor was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin, killed shortly afterwards by the police. This terrorist attack caused a huge stir in France and abroad. Emmanuel Macron had paid a national tribute to the teacher in the symbolic courtyard of the Sorbonne in Paris.
The 18-year-old man, radicalized, accused him of having shown caricatures of Muhammad in class. In an audio message in Russian, he claimed responsibility for his action, congratulating himself on having “avenge the prophet”. He had learned of the accusations against the professor a few days earlier via social networks where videos had been broadcast of Brahim Chnina, father of a schoolgirl targeted by an exclusion for indiscipline and who claimed to have attended the course, and of the sulphurous activist Islamist Abdelhakim Sefrioui.
Fourteen people charged
Fourteen people are indicted, including several college students. In the front row, two acquaintances of Anzorov from his town of Evreux, Azim E. and Naïm B., who accompanied him to buy a knife. The second had gone with him to the college of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Brahim Chnina and Abdelhakim Sefrioui are being prosecuted for complicity in terrorist assassination, suspected of having “targeted” Samuel Paty via a video and thus of having “facilitated the definition of a criminal project” by Abdoullakh Anzorov.
Another questioned for this “complicity” in the assassination, Priscilla M., a thirty-year-old convert to Islam, who was linked on social networks with the assassin, the days preceding the attack. The anti-terrorism judges considered that the one who was called “Sweet scar” on social networks had ” [renforcé] Abdoullakh Anzorov’s determination to commit criminal acts”, ” [facilité] the location of the victim” and he had ” [donné] the ideological arguments for committing the assassination of Samuel Paty”. His lawyer did not react.
Brahim Chnina’s daughter is indicted for slanderous denunciation: she admitted having lied by saying that the teacher had asked Muslim students to report themselves and leave the class during this course. A fifteenth person, a minor teenager, had also been indicted but her file was severed, according to the judicial source.
Separate investigation targeting members of the administration
“The judicial information established that our client had never been in contact with the terrorist and it could never be proven that the terrorist had become aware of the video of Abdelhakim Sefrioui”, commented the lawyers of this last, Elise Arfi, Ouadie Elhamamouchi and Sefen Guez. “Further investigations seemed to be necessary on certain aspects of the case, such as the role of instigator of Faruq Shami”, a Tajik contact from Anzorov in Syria, “who appears to have been the terrorist’s mentor”, they said. added.
The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a separate investigation in April into these accusations against members of the administration for failure to assist a person in danger and failure to prevent a crime. Without these faults, “Samuel Paty could have been saved,” said the lawyer for this part of the Paty family, Me Virginie Le Roy, who did not react Thursday.