2023-11-27 16:25:29
First judicial response to the horror of the murder of Professor Samuel Paty. This Monday began at the Paris Court trial of six teenagers —all of them minors at the time of the events— in relation to the beheading of that history teacher, which took place on October 16, 2020 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the northwest of the Paris region. It was a jihadist attack that shocked French society and that still resonates in the present, as demonstrated by the recent murder of Professor Dominique Bernard, perpetrated on October 13.
And total of 14 people are charged for the death of Paty, committed by a young chechen jihadist whom the police shot down that same fateful afternoon. The eight adults will sit in the dock at the end of 2024 in the main judicial process for that attack. Now the trial of the six teenagers (five boys and one girl) begins. They all studied in the teacher’s center. They are not investigated for crimes of a terrorist nature, but rather common ones.
“The role of the minors was essential in the process that led to the murder,” lawyer Virginie Le Roy, legal representative of the parents and a sister of the teacher, told AFP. As they had between 13 and 15 years old at the time of the events, the hearings are held in a specific court for minors behind closed doors, without the presence of journalists or the public. They could be sentenced to maximum sentence of two and a half years in prison. Those over 13 can go to prison in France if they have committed serious crimes.
The origin of the attack: a student’s lie
The only girl judged originated with a lie slander campaign against the teacher that preceded his brutal murder. On October 7, 2020, she was supposed to attend the class on freedom of expression in which Paty showed the cartoons of Muhammad of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. But she skipped that class on a personal whim and that day she was expelled from the center for two days for a reason unrelated to that course. To justify her expulsion, she told her parents that she had been disciplined because her teacher had asked the Muslim students to raise their hands and leave the class while she was showing the cartoons, and she He had protested about it. Which was completely false.
Based on that lie—in reality, Paty only suggested to the Muslim students that they not look at the electronic board if they considered that the cartoons might offend them—her father and the Islamist militant Abdelhakim Sefrioui started a campaign of hostility against the professor on social networks. They recorded a video in front of the institute calling for his dismissal. Those messages reached Abdoullakh Anzorov, 18 years old and who had lived since he was a child in France where his parents obtained asylum. This young man radicalized in Islamist fundamentalism lived about 80 kilometers from Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, he did not know Professor Paty and he did not have any connection with the institute.
“I don’t know how to make myself forgive”
When a friend dropped him off in front of the institute, Anzorov asked some students at the center if they could tell him what Professor Paty was like and where he was. He told them that he wanted to record him “apologizing for the caricature of the prophet.” One of them accepted in exchange for 300 euros and he embarked four other companions on that stupid idea. Now they are judged for it. The investigating judges considered that these five accomplices were not aware of the jihadist’s real intentions and that is why they charged them with a common crime.
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“When I saw what happened, I told myself that it was not good and that I should have notified the police“, one of those teenagers explained to the magistrates, who threw the 40 euros stained with blood that he won that afternoon into a sewer. “I don’t know how to make myself forgive myself,” said another accused student during an interrogation, who acknowledged that with that money “he dreamed of many things, about “buy video games or digital points for FIFA or Fortnite”. “They certainly regretted what happened when the worst happened. They have not stopped remembering it dozens or thousands of times,” lawyer Dylan Slama, who represents one of these minors, defended in the corridors of the Paris Court.
In addition to this trial and the second of the eight of legal age in November and December 2024, a third could be celebrated for the death of Paty. This is what some of his relatives hope for. They filed a complaint against the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior, accusing them of not having taken the threats against the teacher seriously enough. The prosecution opened an investigation into this in April 2022. Three years after Paty’s beheading, the wound from that attack has not yet healed.
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