Sentences of 14 months in prison suspended to six months in prison – placed under an electronic bracelet – were handed down this Friday, December 8 in Paris against six ex-college students tried for their involvement in the assassination of Professor Samuel Paty by a young jihadist in 2020. Sentences ordered in view “the seriousness of the facts”of their “personality” And “evolution”and while the offenses are “perfectly established”declared the children’s court in its judgment, read in open court after two weeks of a closed-door trial.
For two weeks, six former college students appeared before the Paris children’s court during a closed-door trial for their involvement in the jihadist attack against professor Samuel Paty in 2020. Five of them, at aged 14 and 15 at the time, were appearing for conspiracy to commit aggravated violence. The sixth, 13 years old at the time of the events, was tried for slanderous denunciation for having wrongly accused the teacher of Islamophobia.
On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin. The 18-year-old man, radicalized, accused him of having shown caricatures of Mohammed in class. In an audio message in Russian, he took responsibility for his action, congratulating himself on having “avenged the prophet”. The investigation traced how, in ten days, the trap had closed on Samuel Paty: from the lie of the sixth defendant to the attacks on the internet, until the arrival of the assailant in front of the college, where he had given 300 euros to middle school students to identify the teacher he wanted “filming apologizing”.
The trial, which opened on November 27, ended Friday morning with the last words of the defendants, now high school students. During hearings during the investigation where they collapsed in tears, these college students swore to have imagined that the professor would at most “display on networks”, maybe “humiliate”, “type”… but “Never” that it would be okay “until death”. On the first day of the hearing, the young defendants arrived at court with their faces hidden under their coats, some wearing sunglasses or a surgical mask, accompanied by their parents and their lawyers. Before them, certain relatives of Samuel Paty had entered the room, including his parents, with closed faces, as well as around ten former colleagues of the professor who asked to become civil parties to the trial, by “need to understand”.
In this case, a second trial is scheduled for the end of 2024 for eight adults. These adults will appear before a specially composed assize court with in the front row the two friends of the attacker, suspected of having had precise knowledge of Anzorov’s terrorist project. But also the father of the schoolgirl at the origin of the controversy, who fueled a violent campaign on social networks against the teacher. Four other adults will also be tried for criminal terrorist association.
The threat against teachers persists in France. A teacher from Cognac, in Charente, was threatened with death last week by a high school student because he has the same name as Samuel Paty. The teenager was excluded as a precautionary measure and the teacher filed a complaint. In Gironde, half of the teachers at a high school in Libourne have been exercising their right of withdrawal since Monday, after an anonymous letter, openly racist, threatened to kill a teacher and students of “Arab” origin. Another professor, Dominique Bernard, was recently assassinated in Arras by a young radicalized Islamist, reviving the emotion caused by the death of Samuel Paty three years earlier.