Murder of Samuel Paty: 14 people sent to trial

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: PASCAL GUYOT / AFP 14:06 pm, May 16, 2023

Anti-terrorism investigating judges on Tuesday ordered that 14 people be tried after the 2020 murder of Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher beheaded by a radicalized Islamist shot dead in the wake by police, AFP learned from sources close to the case.

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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 during a class on freedom of expression. In an audio message in Russian, he claimed responsibility for his action by congratulating himself on having "avenged the prophet".

According to elements of the indictment order, which AFP learned of on Tuesday, the "motive" of the assailant was "the revenge of an offense that he considered to have been done to his Prophet, who deserved a death sentence of the professor, desired by his god and his religion".

Investigating magistrates request the most serious offence

For this act, which had caused a great stir in France and abroad, the investigating magistrates requested that the most serious offence, complicity in terrorist murder, be retained for two friends of the assailant Abdullakh Anzorov. These two men, Azim Epsirkhanov and Naim Budaoud, had 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 in murder, as well as Priscilla Mangel, a convert to Islam linked on Twitter with the assassin in the days before the attack.

A trial at the assizes requested

For these three people, as for three other adults implicated to varying degrees, the anti-terrorist judges finally ask for a trial at the assizes but for a less serious offense, criminal terrorist criminal association, according to these sources close to the case.

The magistrates also ordered a separate trial before the juvenile court for five teenagers, aged 14 and 15 at the time of the events, accused in particular of having carried out surveillance in the vicinity of the college and of having designated Samuel Paty to the assailant. They will have to appear for criminal conspiracy to prepare aggravated violence, an offence.

These magistrates also order that the schoolgirl, whose lie about the content of Mr. Paty's course triggered the case, also appear before the juvenile court for slanderous denunciation.