(Paris) Six ex-college students involved in the assassination of professor Samuel Paty in France by a young jihadist in 2020 escaped prison: one was sentenced Friday to six months in prison but placed under an electronic bracelet and five others to suspended sentences.
In this case which caused an international shockwave, the 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed then beheaded in October 2020 near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the Paris region, by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin shot dead in the process by the police.
The young 18-year-old radicalized Islamist criticized the professor for showing caricatures of Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of expression. In an audio message in Russian, he congratulated himself on having “avenged the Prophet”.
Among the ex-college students tried before the children’s court for conspiracy to commit aggravated violence, five, aged 14 and 15 at the time, were accused of having monitored the area around the school and designated Mr. Paty to the assailant, for payment.
The heaviest sentence, two years in prison including six months under an electronic bracelet, was handed down against the former schoolboy approached by the attacker Abdoullakh Anzorov.
“You communicated to the assailant the physical and clothing description” of the professor and his “usually taken route”, “you stayed for several hours” with him and “favored” his “concealment”, the court told him.
“You recruited other college students in order to designate” the teacher, organized “surveillance” around the school “for several hours” and finally “designated Samuel Paty at the end of the school”.
Four other young people were sentenced to sentences ranging from 14 months with suspended probation (that is to say accompanied by a series of obligations, in particular to follow education or training and to be followed by professionals of childhood) at 18 months with probationary suspension.
A sixth teenager, 13 years old at the time of the facts, was sentenced to 18 months of probation for slanderous denunciation. This schoolgirl had wrongly claimed that Mr. 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.
PHOTO BERTRAND GUAY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
“Established offenses”
In its judgment, read in public hearing after two weeks of a closed trial, the court specified that it had taken its decision with regard to “the seriousness of the facts” and the “personality” and “development” of the defendants, then that the offenses are “perfectly established”.
The trial, which opened on November 27, concluded Friday morning with the defendants’ final words, before the court retired to deliberate.
The defendants, now high school students, faced two and a half years of imprisonment.
The trial was held strictly behind closed doors due to their young age at the time of the events. The press was even forbidden to report, via the words of the lawyers, what was said during the debates or what the anti-terrorism prosecution requested.
In this case, a second trial is planned for the end of 2024 for eight adults, including the father of the schoolgirl who fueled a violent campaign on social networks against the teacher.
Not “until death”
The attack took place in a context of high terrorist threat, while the newspaper Charlie Hebdo had republished caricatures of Mohammed a few weeks earlier during the trial of the January 2015 attacks, when 12 people were killed at the headquarters of the satirical weekly by two Islamists.
The emotion caused by this crime was recently rekindled by the assassination, on October 23, 2023, of another professor in France, Dominique Bernard, killed in Arras, in the north of the country, by a young radicalized Islamist.
France has since been hit again by an attack on Saturday December 2, when a radicalized Islamist stabbed to death a young German-Filipino tourist near the Eiffel Tower in Paris and injured two other passers-by.