The trial for six teenagers linked to the Islamist murder and beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020 began this week at a juvenile court in Paris.
The teens, who were aged between 13 and 15 at the time of Paty’s murder, are accused of various charges, including identifying the teacher to Chechen Abdoullakh Anzorov, who went on to behead Paty in the Paris suburb of Yvelines before being shot and killed by French police.
The youngest, who was just 13 at the time of the murder, is reported by the BBC as being the daughter of Brahim Chnina, who was the main driver of a social media campaign against Paty after the 13-year-old alleged that Paty had shown depictions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed to the class as part of a lesson on free expression.
Chnina, along with known Islamists on social media, drew a lot of attention toward Paty, including the attention of 18-year-old Abdoullakh Anzorov, who is said to have had direct contact with Chnina over the messaging app WhatsApp.
Another trial is set to take place next month for Chnina and seven other adults who are accused of being complicit in the murder of Paty. Two of them are said to have been friends of Anzorov, one of whom drove him to Paty’s school on the day of the killing. Another was with the Chechen when he was purchasing weapons.
Just months after the attack, it emerged that the young daughter of Chnina had lied about being in Paty’s class at the time the teacher showed depictions of Mohammed to the class.
Speaking to a French counter-terrorism judge, the girl stated that she had not only lied about being in class at the time but had also made up other assertions, such as claiming that Paty had identified the Muslims in the class and told them to leave when he showed pictures of Mohammed from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The admissions came after the teen’s fellow students testified that she had not been present in the class at the time and refuted her assertions that Muslims were told to leave the classroom. Instead, Paty had told them to look away while showing the depiction for a few brief seconds.
The 13-year-old, Franceinfo reports, will be charged with “slanderous denunciation,” while the other teens were involved with helping Anzorov identify Paty, with the Chechen approaching one of them and offering a sum of 300 euros.
One of the pupils, who was 14 at the time, claimed that he agreed to help Anzorov and told investigators, “I suspected he was going to do something big, because you don’t offer a large sum of money like that.”
“I thought he was going to fight (…) In the back of my mind, I didn’t believe he was going to kill him,” the student said. He claimed that later he went to the other defendants to brag about receiving the money and they all offered to keep watch with Anzorov in order to properly identify Paty in exchange for part of the cash.
The students later claimed that Anzorov had told them that he simply wanted to approach Paty and force him to apologize for showing depictions of Mohammed and film the encounter.
“He didn’t tell us he wanted to kill him,” one of the students said and added that he thought it, “weird that a guy would pay 300 euros just for an apology. With his friends, we imagined things like that he was going to kill him or kidnap him.”
Dylan Slama, a lawyer representing one of the juvenile defendants, stated, “We’re going to have to put things in context and hope that we understand that a 15-year-old didn’t have a lot of perspective. It’s a tragedy that no one saw coming,” and stated his client was anxious about the trial.
“But it’s also a kind of relief for him to see this deadline coming, which he’s had in his head for a long time, like a sword of Damocles,” the lawyer stated.
The trial will be held behind closed doors and is somewhat unique as minors are rarely prosecuted in connection to terrorist attacks. The defendants all face sentences of up to two and a half years in prison if convicted.
