The decision is expected this Friday, after two weeks of trial. The Paris children’s court must render its decision today following the trial of six former college students, tried behind closed doors for their involvement in the 2020 assassination of professor Samuel Paty by a young jihadist.
The trial ends this Friday morning with the last words of the young defendants. Then the court will retire to deliberate, and should render its decision, in public hearing, late in the afternoon or in the evening.
The teenagers, now high school students, face two and a half years of imprisonment.
Five of the defendants, aged 14 and 15, are on trial for conspiracy to commit aggravated violence. They are accused of having monitored the surroundings of the college and designated Samuel Paty as the attacker, for remuneration.
A sixth teenager, aged 13 at the time of the events, appears for slanderous denunciation. This schoolgirl had wrongly claimed that Samuel Paty had asked the Muslim students in the class to report and leave the class before showing the caricatures of Mohammed. She hadn’t actually attended this class.
His lie was at the origin of a violent campaign fueled on social networks by his father and by an Islamist activist who authored videos which had drawn attention to the professor. They will be judged during the second trial.
The investigation traced how, in ten days, the trap had closed on Samuel Paty: from the lie of the schoolgirl to the attacks on the Internet, until the arrival of the attacker in front of the school on October 16, where he had given 300 euros to college students to identify the teacher he wanted to “film apologizing”.
During hearings during the investigation where they collapsed in tears, these college students swore they had imagined that the professor would at most be “posted on the networks”, perhaps “humiliated”, “hit”… but “never” that it would go “until death”.
After this first trial in this case, which created a huge stir in France and abroad, another trial is planned for the eight adults involved, at the end of 2024.