A trial begins in France for teenagers accused of aiding the murderer of a teacher
Six teenagers went on trial in Paris on Monday on charges linked to the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher whose beheading by an Islamist extremist in 2020 inflicted lasting trauma on France.
The defendants, former high school students at the school where Mr. Paty are accused of helping the killer identify and track down the teacher, even though they are believed to have been unaware that he was planning to kill.
Officials have not publicly named the suspects and they are being tried behind closed doors at a criminal court for minors in Paris. They risk a prison sentence of two and a half years.
A separate trial for eight adults charged in the case is expected to take place next year.
Mr Paty, 47, had shown caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed to a civics class to illustrate freedom of expression and was subsequently beheaded for the act on October 16, 2020, near the school where he worked in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a northwestern suburb of Paris. The attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent, was shot dead by police later the same day.
Mr Paty’s murder deeply shocked France, where teachers play a crucial role in transmitting the French Republic’s values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism. Teachers like Mr. Paty are seen as the first line of defense for a public, secular school system that many fear is increasingly threatened by Islamic extremism.
Just last month, almost three years after Mr Paty’s murder, another teacher, Dominique Bernard, 57, who taught French literature, was murdered at his school in northern France under ominously similar circumstances. The suspect in the case is a former student of the school, a 20-year-old Russian immigrant who prosecutors say pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before carrying out a stabbing spree that also injured three other people.
The trial, which started on Monday, will run until December 8. It is closed to the media and reporters are legally prohibited from revealing the identities of the defendants or reporting on the proceedings.
Prosecutors have accused five of the defendants, who were between 14 and 15 years old at the time of the killing, of helping Mr. Anzorov identify and track down Mr. Paty, including by standing guard outside their school and tell Mr Anzorov what he looked like. , and by pointing it out to him when he left school. The teens are accused of a criminal conspiracy to prepare a violent attack.
Lawyers for the defendants have argued that their clients are consumed with guilt over the teacher’s death and that they did not know at the time that Mr. Anzorov intended to kill Mr. Paty. Mr. Anzorov had stalked Mr. Paty’s school on the day of the murder and enlisted the teenagers’ help in exchange for about $330, telling them he wanted to confront the teacher and force him to apologize.
Antoine Ory, a lawyer for one of the teenage defendants, said at the courthouse Monday that his client “has been gripped by remorse for the past three years.”
The sixth defendant, a girl who was 13 at the time of the murder, has been charged with making false accusations against Mr Paty.
Mr Paty, who taught social studies, had shown the students caricatures published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – itself the target of a massacre in 2015 – to illustrate the right to blasphemy, freedom of expression and freedom of conscience .
Prosecutors have said the girl told her parents that Mr. Paty had singled out Muslim students in the class and asked them to leave before showing the caricatures. In reality, the girl had not attended that class and Mr. Paty had not ordered the Muslim students to leave.
The girl, who had been suspended from school for two days for unrelated reasons, told her parents she had been punished for complaining to Mr Paty about the caricatures.
But the girl’s false story caused a tragic chain reaction, according to prosecutors. Her father, Brahim Chnina, spread the claims on social media. When Mr. Anzorov, who lived almost 60 miles away, heard of the controversy, he set out to kill Mr. Paty. Prosecutors said at the time that he had repeatedly contacted Mr. Chnina.
Louis Cailliez, an attorney for one of Paty’s sisters, told reporters at the courthouse on Monday that he hoped the trial would determine the extent of the teens’ responsibility in what he called “a fatal combination of small cowardice and big lies.”
Mr Chnina and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, an Islamist activist who filmed online videos calling Mr Paty an anti-Muslim “thug” and demanding he be fired, are among six adults who will be tried at a later date on charges of organizing a criminal. terrorist conspiracy.
Two other adults, friends of Mr. Anzorov, who are accused of helping him buy weapons and driving him to the school, have been charged with complicity in the killing.