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22-12-2024
PARIS: A Paris court on Friday convicted eight people for their roles in the events that led to the killing of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who’s stabbing and decapitation by an Islamist terrorist in 2020 deeply shocked France.
Paty was slain in October 2020 near his school northwest of Paris by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent who was angered by the teacher’s display of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate free speech in an eighth-grade civics class. The police shot and killed Anzorov shortly after the violent assault.
The verdict, decided by a panel of judges, was more severe than some had expected, in some cases going beyond what prosecutors had requested, a possible indication of the trauma that Paty’s killing inflicted on France.
It was an “irreparable attack on the Republic’s fundamental values,” Franck Zientara, the presiding judge, said of the teacher’s killing as he read the verdict, which was greeted by cheers by some in the courtroom and by cries of dismay from the families of the defendants.
Paty’s killing came after larger terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016 that together killed hundreds of people. Paty’s death also deeply unsettled the country and fed worries that France’s public-school teachers who play a crucial role in imparting the French Republic’s values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism were increasingly under threat from attacks by Islamist extremists.
Those fears were heightened last year, when another teacher was killed in eerily similar circumstances in northern France.
Two defendants, Naim Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, friends of Mr. Anzorov, were found guilty of being complicit in the attack and sentenced to 16 years each in prison. They were accused of helping Anzorov procure a knife and two pellet guns for his attack on Paty. Boudaoud was also accused of driving Anzorov to a point near the school. Both said they had no previous knowledge of Anzorov’s plans.
Two others, who also pleaded not guilty, were found guilty of being part of a criminal terrorist conspiracy and sentenced to 13 years and 15 years in prison. They were accused of fueling an online smear campaign against Paty that ultimately caught the attention of the killer, who lived about 50 miles away from the school.
Four other defendants were found guilty of encouraging Anzorov online and glorifying his attack on social media. They received prison sentences ranging from one year to five years in prison, with some or all of that time suspended for three of them.
“It’s a perfectly balanced verdict,” said Francis Szpiner, a lawyer for some of Mr. Paty’s relatives, adding that the late teacher’s son, now 9 years old and present in court on Friday, had “understood that justice has been done for his father.”
Paty’s killing was the result of a chain reaction set off by one of his students, who was 13 at the time. During the week of Paty’s civics class, she told her parents that he had asked Muslim students to leave the room when he displayed the caricatures, and that she had been expelled from school when she protested that he was being discriminatory.
In fact, she had lied, and was convicted last year of making false accusations against Paty. She had not attended that class. Paty had not ordered Muslim students to leave. And her two-day expulsion was for repeated misbehavior at school but in the hands of adults who believed her, what started as an attempt to cover disciplinary failings quickly morphed into something else. (Int’l News Desk)
