France: Trial begins for accomplices of the Islamist who beheaded a teacher in 2020
That year, an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim killed Samuel Paty, who days earlier had given a class on freedom of speech in the midst of a cultural battle between Islam and secularism in public schools.
File image of a rally in honor of Samuel Paty in France.
The trial of eight people accused of contributing to the hate campaign that incited an 18-year-old Russian-Chechen Islamist to decapitate a high school teacher in 2020 began Monday in France.
Seven men and one woman are appearing in court in Paris in the trial for the murder of Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, which shocked France.
The perpetrator of the murder, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was abducted by police minutes after committing his crime near the school where Paty taught, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris.
Anzorov was angry with Paty because he showed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in a class on freedom of speech.
The events shocked the entire country, where conservatives claim there is a growing Islamist and antisemitic wave affecting society. Education is one of the focal points of this issue. Local French governments struggle to maintain public schools under a secular model. However, the expulsion of Christianity in the 19th century has given way today to a vacuum that Islam is exploiting.
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The accused include Brahim Chnina, a Moroccan father of a student, and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a militant French-Moroccan Islamist, who launched a hate campaign against Paty on social media. Both men have been in detention for four years.
Also in the dock are two friends of the attacker, charged with "aiding and abetting terrorist murder," a crime punishable by life in prison.
Naïm Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, reportedly accompanied Anzorov to a cutlery shop on the eve of the attack.
Six former students of the school were sentenced in 2023 to sentences ranging from 14 months suspended to six months in jail, following a closed trial before a juvenile court.
Samuel Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of a class to debate freedom of speech laws in France.
His murder took place just weeks after the magazine republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to defend freedom of the press.
After the first publication of these images in 2015, Charlie Hebdo was the target of a jihadist attack that killed 12 journalists and cartoonists that worked for the publication.
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