On Monday, November 4th, the trial began of eight people involved in the murder of history teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded just over four years ago. The tragedy moved the whole of France, both because of its symbolic significance and the savagery of the crime.
On October 16th, 2020, a young Islamist, Abdullakh Anzorov, a Chechen who was eighteen at the time and had asylum seeker status, murdered history teacher Samuel Paty, who taught in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in the Paris suburbs. Having shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in one of his lessons on freedom of expression, the teacher was the target of false accusations and harassment on social media by some of his Muslim pupils. Anzorov identified Paty and prepared an attack where he brutally slit his target’s throat with a cleaver one afternoon shortly after the teacher left the school.
The murderer is not among those facing trial at the Paris Assize Court, as he was shot dead by the police shortly after killing his victim. The people on trial are accused of having played a role in the campaign of hatred and harassment that targeted Samuel Paty before his murder.
Two friends of the murderer, already in custody, are on trial for complicity in a terrorist murder and face life imprisonment. They are accused in particular of having accompanied Anzorov to a cutlery shop the day before the attack to choose the murder weapon with him.
The other six defendants are still at large and on trial for participation in a criminal terrorist association. They each face up to 30 years’ imprisonment. They include the father of one of Samuel Paty’s pupils, who falsely claimed that the teacher had asked Muslim pupils to leave the classroom when he was about to show the Mohammed cartoons. At his side were other men who had also copiously relayed the teenager’s lie on social media or had exchanged messages with the murderer in the days leading up to the attack, fanning the flames of his violence and hatred.
The pupils involved, aged around 13 at the time of the attack, had already been tried in a previous trial before a juvenile court.
Even in the absence of the murderer, the trial makes sense, according to the lawyers for Mickaëlle Paty, Samuel’s sister. Thibault de Montbrial and Pauline Ragot, who are handling her case, released this statement:
The tragic mechanism that led to Samuel Paty’s martyrdom reveals the depth of Islamist infiltration in France and its porosity for terrorism. Exposing it in detail in open court should not only lead to the severe condemnation of those who contributed to it but should also raise the awareness of our society in the face of a mortal danger.
Samuel Paty’s family is hoping to give this trial for an extraordinary crime a major public profile. The hearing is being conducted by the magistrate who notably led the trial of the murderer of Father Jacques Hamel, who was also murdered because of Islamist motives in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in 2016.
Mickaëlle Paty also published an investigative book, Le cours de monsieur Paty, four years to the day after her brother’s murder—an account that denounces the chain of cowardice and avoidance of responsibility that she believes made her brother’s death possible.
One of the aims of the trial is for the family to shed light on Samuel Paty’s feelings of abandonment by the national education system, even though he knew he was under threat and in mortal danger. “I have been threatened by local Islamists,” he wrote to his colleagues on October 10th, 2020, four days after his lecture on freedom of expression. At no time did the threatened teacher receive police protection. He was used to walking home but given the climate of threats in which he lived, he had been asking colleagues to take him home by car on the four days preceding his murder.
Unfortunately, on October 16th, the eve of the school holidays, none of them were available. As proof of his sense of the danger to which he had been exposed since the famous lesson, he was carrying a hammer, discovered in his rucksack after his murder—no doubt hoping to defend himself clumsily amidst the murderous madness that was looming.
