When are you complicit in a gruesome, terrorist murder of an innocent teacher? That question was central to the trial into the murder of history and geography teacher Samuel Paty (47), which came to an end on Friday evening. Paty was stabbed to death and beheaded in October 2020 in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine by radicalized Chechen Abdoullakh Anzorov (18), who was furious after hearing that Paty had shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a lesson. The killer posted a photo of Paty’s head on Twitter and called the teacher a “hell of a dog who dared to humiliate Mohammed.”
Anzorov was shot dead by police the same day and could therefore not be prosecuted. But the murder didn’t come out of nowhere: it was the climax of a days-long online hate campaign against Paty. The people who contributed to that campaign or otherwise to the murder are still alive. Fourteen of them had to appear in court.
At the end of last year, six minors, who, among others, had pointed out Paty to Anzorov, were given prison sentences of up to six months. The eight adult suspects were sentenced to one to sixteen years in prison on Friday evening imposed. It is striking that the judge ruled for several suspects, other than the Public Prosecution Service, that they were guilty of “complicity in a terrorist murder”. This was probably to the relief of Paty’s loved ones, who were furious when the Public Prosecution Service dropped this qualification.
Also read
Mickaëlle Paty: ‘The laxity of the French state led to Samuel’s death’
Anzorov’s friends
The eight suspects played different roles in the murder that shocked France. The country had been shocked by Islamic terrorism more often in previous years, but never before had a teacher been murdered because of what he had taught. The harshest sentences were imposed on two friends of Anzorov who, among other things, helped him obtain weapons. 23-year-old Chechen Azim Epsirkhanov and 22-year-old Frenchman Naïm Boudaoud have been sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
Epsirkhanov and Boudaoud helped their friend buy a knife (not the weapon used to kill Paty) the day before the murder. Anzorov had also asked Epsirkhanov to arrange a firearm, but that was not possible. On the day of the murder, Boudaoud bought airsoft pistols together with Anzorov (one of which Anzorov used against the police after the murder). Boudaoud also brought the murderer to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine a few hours before the murder.
Both state that they did not know what their friend was planning to do, nor that he had been radicalized. “All I knew was that he prayed five times a day,” said Epsirkhanov in court. Boudaoud initially acknowledged that he knew that Anzorov was “completely absorbed” in his faith and had sometimes said that he wanted to go on jihad in Syria, but he later denied this. He did not find it shocking that his friend did not shake hands with women. “There are so many guys like that.”
Nor did alarm bells ring when their friend wanted a knife and another weapon. And Boudaoud said that he did not know that he dropped Anzorov off near the school of the long-threatened Samuel Paty: he said he simply followed the GPS in which Anzorov had entered an address. The terrorism prosecutor’s office did not agree with this and ruled that the two were “fully aware of this.” [Anzorovs] jihadist beliefs and provided him with the means to implement them.”
Also read
‘There is a France before and after the beheading’
Online hate campaign
The other six suspects played a role in the online hate campaign against Paty prior to the murder. According to the judge, 65-year-old radical Islamist Abdelhakim Sefrioui (who received a fifteen-year prison sentence) and 52-year-old Brahim Chnina (thirteen years in prison) are largely responsible for this. The campaign started eleven days before the murder with a lie by the daughter of Chnina, Paty’s then 13-year-old student who had told her father that Paty had ordered Muslim students to leave class because he was going to show pornographic images of the prophet. to see. When she opposed this, she was allegedly suspended.
This was nonsense: she had been suspended for some other reason and was not present during class at all. Moreover, Paty had not sent anyone away, but only announced that he cartoons of the prophet was going to show and that students who wanted to could close their eyes or leave the classroom. (The daughter previously received 18 months’ probation for defamation.)
Chnina then took to the internet to demand Paty’s resignation based on his daughter’s story. Radical Muslims like Sefrioui picked up his message, after which a real hate campaign arose in which Paty was depicted as an Islam hater. Chnina has expressed remorse in court and denies being part of a terrorist organization – he would just wanted to protect his daughter because he thought she had been discriminated against. Sefriouis lawyers underlined that there was no concrete ‘fatwa’ against Paty and portray his involvement in the hate campaign as logical for someone who is committed to the fight against Islamophobia.
The four other suspects, Yusuf Cinar (22), Ismaël Gamaev (22), Louqmane Ingar (22) and Priscilla Mangel (36) were sentenced to one to five years in prison. According to the public prosecutor’s office, they were active members of the jihadosphere in which Anzorov was online. For example, Mangel, a French convert to Islam, had extensive contact with Anzorov in the days before the murder, saying that Paty’s lesson was “illustrative of the war that had been waged by republican institutions against Muslims for years.” He would have seen this as encouragement.
The statements led to many emotions in the packed courtroom on Friday evening, court reporters report X. Sefrioui immediately shouted to appeal and said that the judge was “doing politics”, a daughter of Chnina started screaming, relatives of Boudaoud were crying. But there was also brief clapping on this last day of a historic trial.