(Paris) The first trial in the case of the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty by a young jihadist opened Monday in Paris, where six former college students appear behind closed doors before the children’s court.
A second trial, to judge eight adults, will take place before the special assize court in Paris at the end of 2024.
The young defendants arrived in court on Monday, their faces camouflaged, accompanied by their parents and their lawyers.
Before them, relatives of Samuel Paty entered the room, as well as around ten former colleagues of the professor, who want to become a civil party to the trial, despite the opposition of the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office.
After a debate, the court decided that it would decide the matter later by allowing the professors to attend the trial, scheduled until December 8.
“It’s a relief, we’ve been waiting for this for three years, to hear from our students,” testified one of them, a literature professor at the same college, in front of the courtroom. Samuel Paty, “it’s our daily life, we don’t teach the same at all today,” declares another teacher, visibly moved.
National Education has also become a civil party, “to forcefully reaffirm our desire to defend the values of the Republic that Samuel Paty embodied”, commented the Minister of Education Gabriel Attal, contacted by AFP.
The attack, which occurred against a backdrop of a high terrorist threat, caused immense excitement in France and abroad.
PHOTO ERIC GAILLARD, REUTERS ARCHIVES
A makeshift memorial to pay tribute to Samuel Paty was installed in Nice in October 2020.
On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Paris region) by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin. This 18-year-old radicalized Islamist was killed immediately by the police.
He 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”.
The emotion provoked by this crime was recently rekindled by the assassination in mid-October of another professor, Dominique Bernard, killed in Arras in the north of France by a young radicalized Islamist.
Five teenagers – aged 14 and 15 at the time of the assassination of Samuel Paty – are on trial for criminal conspiracy to prepare aggravated violence. They are accused of having monitored the surroundings of the college and designated Mr. Paty as the attacker, for remuneration.
“He is consumed by remorse,” said Me Antoine Ory about his client. “He is terrified, very worried about finding himself face to face with Samuel Paty’s family.”
A sixth teenager, aged 13 at the time of the events, appears 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.
His lie was at the origin of a violent campaign fueled on social networks by his father, Brahim Chnina, and by an Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui, author of videos which had drawn attention to the professor.
These two men will be tried during the second trial.
” Gear ”
For the family of Samuel Paty, this first trial is “fundamental”. “The role of minors is essential in the spiral which led to the assassination” of the professor, said Me Virginie Le Roy, who represents her parents and one of her sisters.
“The defense will unsurprisingly plead youthful error” but this trial is “highly anticipated for those seeking to understand the real causes which led these schoolboys on the path to irreparability”, declared before the opening of the debates Louis Cailliez, lawyer for Mickaëlle Paty, one of the sisters of the murdered professor.
The investigation traced how, in ten days, the trap had closed on Samuel Paty: from the lie of the schoolgirl to the online attacks, until the arrival of the attacker in front of the school on October 16.
“Hey kid, come see, I have something to offer you,” said Abdoullakh Anzorov to a teenager, offering him 300 euros to identify Mr. Paty whom the assailant said he wanted to “film apologizing”.
The schoolboy “boasts” and relays the proposition, not “feeling like doing it alone”. Four others joined him, according to testimonies cited in the order of the investigating judges consulted by AFP.
Some go back and forth between the college and Anzorov’s “hideout”, keep watch, or film themselves with tickets.
The assailant asks one of them to telephone the teenager who started the affair. She repeats her lie, without knowing that he was listening, she assures.
During auditions where they collapsed in tears, the college students swore that they had imagined that the professor would at most be “posted on the networks”, perhaps “humiliated”, “hit”… but that “never” it would go “until death”.
At the end of class, Samuel Paty is designated by the teenagers: “He is there”. He will be assassinated shortly before 5 p.m.
The teenagers are now high school students. They face two and a half years of imprisonment.