French court convicts 8 people tied to events that led to teacher’s beheading

PARIS – A Paris court on Dec 20 convicted eight people over their roles in the events that led to the killing of Mr Samuel Paty, a history teacher whose stabbing and decapitation by an Islamic terrorist in 2020 deeply shocked France.

Mr Paty was

slain in October 2020 near his school north-west of Paris by Abdoullakh Anzorov,

an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent who was angered by the teacher’s display of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate free speech in an eighth-grade civics class. Police shot and killed Anzorov shortly after the violent assault.

The verdict, decided by a panel of judges, was more severe than some had expected, in some cases going beyond what prosecutors had requested – a possible indication of the trauma that Mr Paty’s killing inflicted on France.

It was an “irreparable attack on the Republic’s fundamental values”, presiding judge Franck Zientara said of the teacher’s killing as he read the verdict, which was greeted by cheers by some in the courtroom and by cries of dismay from the families of the defendants.

Mr Paty’s killing came after larger terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016 that together killed hundreds of people. His death deeply unsettled the country and fed worries that France’s public-school teachers – who play a crucial role in imparting the French Republic’s values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism – were increasingly under threat from attacks by Islamic extremists.

Those fears were heightened in 2023, when another teacher was killed in eerily similar circumstances in northern France.

Two defendants, Naim Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, friends of Anzorov, were found guilty of being complicit in the attack and sentenced to 16 years each in prison.

They were accused of helping Anzorov procure a knife and two pellet guns for his attack on Mr Paty. Boudaoud was also accused of driving Anzorov to a point near the school. Both said they had no previous knowledge of Anzorov’s plans.

Two others, who also pleaded not guilty, were found guilty of being part of a criminal terrorist conspiracy and sentenced to 13 years and 15 years in prison. They were accused of fuelling an online smear campaign against Mr Paty that ultimately caught the attention of the killer, who lived about 80km away from the school.

Four other defendants were found guilty of encouraging Anzorov online and glorifying his attack on social media. They received prison sentences ranging from one year to five years in prison, with some or all of that time suspended for three of them.

“It’s a perfectly balanced verdict,” said Mr Francis Szpiner, a lawyer for some of Mr Paty’s relatives, adding that the late teacher’s son, now nine years old and present in court Dec 20, had “understood that justice has been done for his father”.

Mr Paty’s killing was the result of a chain reaction set off by one of his students, who was 13 at the time. During the week of Mr Paty’s civics class, she told her parents that he had asked Muslim students to leave the room when he displayed the caricatures, and that she had been expelled from school when she protested that he was being discriminatory.

In fact, she had lied, and was convicted in 2023 of making false accusations against Mr Paty. She had not attended that class. Mr Paty had not ordered Muslim students to leave. And her two-day expulsion was for repeated misbehaviour at school.

But in the hands of adults who believed her, what started as an attempt to cover disciplinary failings quickly morphed into something else.

The court found her father Brahim Chnina, 52, and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, 65, an activist, guilty of spurring the online smear campaign against Mr Paty by spreading false claims and personal information about him.

Neither knew Mr Paty’s killer personally or had met him; nor were they accused of being aware of his plot. But Chnina accused Mr Paty in social media messages and two videos that went viral. Sefrioui posted his own video several days later. Both described Mr Paty as a “thug” in their videos and called for him to be punished.

During the trial, which began in November, witnesses and investigators described Chnina as a pious Muslim who was not known to espouse extreme views. He was mainly devoted to an organisation that helped people with physical disabilities go on pilgrimages to Mecca, and he was extremely active on social media to promote it.

“It’s true that I went too fast, that I didn’t think straight and didn’t think of the risks,” Chnina, looking gaunt and tired, told the court in his closing statements. But, he added, “I am not a terrorist”.

Sefrioui is a long-time pro-Palestinian activist who led a group named after the founder of Hamas that was disbanded after Mr Paty’s killing. Investigators and witnesses described him as an Islamic agitator who misrepresented himself as a leading French imam and who was adept at stirring unrest and unruly protests. Sefrioui rejected that description.

Asked by the presiding judge if he believed that he had any responsibility in the “causal chain” of events that led to Mr Paty’s death, Sefrioui said: “I’m not in the chain at all.” Sefrioui’s lawyers argued that there was no proof, for instance, that Mr Paty’s killer had even seen Sefrioui’s video.

But the court ruled that Chnina had “blindly” believed his daughter and was then egged on by Sefrioui in a “campaign of hatred” that led to Mr Paty’s death.

The caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that the teacher showed had originally been published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – itself the target of a massacre in 2015. A month before he was killed, the magazine had republished the caricatures, leading to new terrorist threats against France and a knife attack near the magazine’s former offices.

The court said that Chnina and Sefrioui, by “knowingly” targeting Mr Paty online in that context had sent out a dog whistle for would-be terrorists like Anzorov, even if they had not openly called for the teacher to be harmed.

Defence lawyers called that argument an unreasonable legal stretch. Several accused the court of bending to pressure from public opinion and said that they would appeal against the verdict, even as members of the audience heckled them.

After Mr Paty’s death, President Emmanuel Macron of France eulogised him as a “quiet hero”. At the trial, Mr Paty’s family and former partner gave heart-wrenching testimony – describing him as a son raised by two public-school teachers with an “all-consuming” passion for history; a brother who loved to debate; a doting father; and a voracious reader with an extensive book collection, including the Quran.

He was curious, tolerant and loved to teach, they said. He told none of them that he was worried about his safety after the videos and messages against him went viral.

“I am emotional, relieved,” Ms Gaelle Paty, Mr Paty’s sister, said after the verdict. She praised the court for establishing the “truth” of what had happened to her brother.

It was important, she said, “for me, but also for all of France”. NYTIMES