Assassination of Samuel Paty: the anti-terrorist prosecutor's office asks for 14 people to be tried

Europe 1 with AFP 13h28, 07 April 2023, modified at 13h28, 07 April 2023

The national anti-terrorist prosecutor's office (Pnat) is asking that 14 people be tried after the murder on October 16, 2020 of Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher beheaded by a radicalized Islamist killed in the wake by the police, AFP learned Friday from a source close to the case.

On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old teacher was stabbed and beheaded near his school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) by Abdullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin. The radicalized 18-year-old accused him of showing cartoons of Mohammed in class. In an audio message in Russian, he claimed responsibility for his action by congratulating himself on having "avenged the prophet".

The Pnat calls for the offence of complicity in terrorist murder to be retained

For this act, which had caused a great stir in France and abroad, the Pnat asked for a trial at the Assizes and that the most serious offence, complicity in terrorist murder, be retained only for two friends of the assailant. Azim E. and Naïm B. accompanied him to buy a knife. The second had gone with him to the college of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

Brahim Chnina, father of a schoolgirl who was excluded for indiscipline and who claimed to have attended the course, and the sulphurous Islamist militant Abdelhakim Sefrioui, authors of videos on social networks that had stirred up controversy, had been indicted for complicity, as had Priscilla M., a thirty-year-old convert to Islam, in connection on Twitter with the assassin in the days before the attack. But for these three people, as for three other adults, the Pnat finally asks for a trial, also at the assizes, for criminal terrorist criminal association, according to the source close to the file.

A trial for five middle school students requested

The Public Prosecutor's Office is also requesting a trial before the juvenile court for five students for criminal conspiracy to prepare aggravated violence, a misdemeanor. The Pnat demands that the schoolgirl at the origin of the case also appear before this court for slanderous denunciation, according to the source close to the file.

Closed in early October, the investigations were then reopened for a few weeks, the time according to a source close to the file to check the schedule of relatives of Abdullakh Anzorov. It is now up to the anti-terrorist investigating judges to make a final decision on whether to send these people to trial.