suspended prison sentences and an adjustable sentence were handed down for six college students

The trial was held strictly behind closed doors. Another trial, for the adults involved in the teacher’s death, is scheduled for the end of 2024.

On Friday December 8, the Paris court sentenced six college students tried for their involvement in the assassination of Samuel Paty to prison sentences. from 14 months suspended prison sentence to six months in prison. The prison sentence concerns the teenager who had named the professor as his executioner. It is convertible.

These sentences were ordered with regard “the seriousness of the facts”of the “personality” adolescents and their “evolution”and this, while the offenses are “perfectly established”said the children’s court in its judgment. The trial, which lasted two weeks, was held strictly behind closed doors given the young age of the defendants at the time of the events, between 13 and 15 years old. uAnother trial is planned for the eight adults involved at the end of 2024.

Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed then beheaded in October 2020 near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin killed in the process by the police. The 18-year-old radicalized Islamist criticized the teacher for showing his students caricatures of Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of expression.

A sentence of two years in prison, including six years

Five of the teenagers, aged 14 and 15, were on trial for conspiracy to commit aggravated violence. They were accused of having monitored the surroundings of the college and designated Samuel Paty as the attacker, for remuneration. 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. 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, aged 13 at the time of the facts, was sentenced to 18 months of probation 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.