FRENCH COURT OPENS CASE AGAINST TEENS OVER BEHEADING OF TEACHER

Paty, 47, was killed outside his school in a Paris suburb by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old assailant of Chechen origin, who was shot dead by police soon afterwards.

Six teenagers went on trial in connection with the beheading of a French teacher who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression. Samuel Paty was killed outside his school in Paris by an 18-year-old assailant https://t.co/80OaVjOXFQ pic.twitter.com/I5AXT91Tbq

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 27, 2023

The six youths cannot be identified due to their age. They entered court on Monday wearing hoodies to hide their faces.

Five of the six, who were 14 to 15 years old at the time, face up to 2.5 years in prison for criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence. They are accused of identifying the teacher to the killer in exchange for money.

The other defendant, a girl who was 13 at the time, allegedly told her parents that Paty had asked Muslim pupils to leave the room before showing the caricatures. However, she was not in the class at the time.

Consumed with regret

During questioning, the teenagers swore that at most they thought Paty would be “flagged up on social media”, “humiliated” or maybe “roughed up”, but they never imagined “it would go as far as murder”.

“He is consumed with regret and is very fearful of the confrontation with Paty’s family,” Antoine Ory, lawyer for one of the accused, said on Monday before the hearing started.

Paty’s sister Mickaelle said in a statement through lawyer Louis Cailliez that her brother would still be alive without a “fatal association of small cowardices, big lies”.

“The role of the minors was fundamental in the sequence of events that led to his assassination,” a lawyer for Paty’s family said.

Last month, almost two years to the day of Paty’s killing, a 20-year-old man fatally stabbed teacher Dominique Bernard and gravely wounded two other people in an attack at a school in northern France.

Like Anzorov, Bernard’s suspected killer Mohammed Moguchkov also hailed from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus region.

Anzorov targeted Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class the cartoons. They had originally featured in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, triggering a deadly attack by gunmen.