French teacher that was beheaded
Six students apprehended for killing French teacher. Six youths were tried in Paris on Monday for their roles in the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, the first of two trials in a crime that shocked France.
A judicial source told AFP that the suspects entered in the closed-doors juvenile court with their coats over their faces.
The 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
His attacker, 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead at the scene by police.
Paty was murdered by a young radicalised Islamist after word circulated on social media that the instructor had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Paty used the magazine in an ethics lecture to analyze free speech legislation in France, where blasphemy is legal and drawings criticizing religious figures are common.
His murder occurred just weeks after Charlie Hebdo posted the caricatures. When the magazine first used the images in 2015, Islamic gunmen stormed its office, killing 12 people.
Dominique Bernard, another teacher, was murdered in Arras, northern France, last month by a young radicalized Islamist.
Bernard’s accused killer, Mohammed Moguchkov, was also from Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region.
– ‘Minority Status’ –
Five of the teenagers on trial, all of whom were 14 or 15 at the time of Paty’s murder, will face charges of criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence.
They are accused of looking for Paty and identifying him to the murderer in exchange for money.
A sixth juvenile, who was 13 at the time, is accused of making false accusations after falsely claiming that Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the classroom before showing the drawings.
A trial for eight adults also charged in the case is set for late 2024.
According to Virginie Le Roy, a lawyer representing Paty’s parents and one of his sisters, the teenagers’ trial is critical.
“The role of the minors was fundamental in the sequence of events that led to his assassination,” she went on to say.
During questioning, the students claimed that they expected Paty to be “flagged up on social media,” “humiliated,” or “roughed up,” but never dreamed “it would go as far as murder.”
They are currently in high school and face two and a half years in prison.
“It’s complicated,” said Dylan Slama, a lawyer for one of the defendants.
“He will be associated with this for the rest of his life.”
The trial is set to last until December 8.