Eight people went on trial in France on Monday, accused of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to an 18-year-old Islamist radical of Chechen descent to behead teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris in 2020.
Seven men and a woman will appear in court in the trial, which will last until December, over the murder of 47-year-old Paty, a history and geography teacher, that shocked France.
The trial began when the defendants confirmed their identities, an AFP correspondent said.
Perpetrator Abdoullakh Anzorov, who had sought asylum in France, was himself killed by police shortly after killing Paty near his school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
The teacher, who showed his class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, is considered a hero of freedom of expression by French authorities and his school is now named after him.
Six defendants, three of whom are under judicial supervision and not currently in prison, are being tried for participating in a criminal act of terrorism, a crime punishable by thirty years in prison.
Among them is Brahim Chnina, a 52-year-old Moroccan.
He is the father of a 13-year-old schoolgirl who claimed Paty asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
The claim was false and she was not in class at the time.
Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old French-Moroccan Islamist activist, is also on trial.
He and Chnina spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecutor, of “designating a target,” “provoking a feeling of hatred” and “thus preparing various crimes.”
Both men had been in pre-trial detention for four years.
– ‘Deadly danger’ –
Two of the attacker’s young friends face even more serious charges of “complicity in terrorist murder,” a crime punishable by up to life in prison.
Naim Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, a Russian of Chechen descent, are accused of accompanying Anzorov to a knife shop in the northern city of Rouen the day before the attack.
“Nearly three years of investigations have never been able to establish that Naim Boudaoud had any knowledge of the attacker’s criminal plans,” his lawyers Adel Fares and Hiba Rizkallah told AFP, denying their client’s “complicity” in the crime.
Thibault de Montbrial and Pauline Ragot, lawyers for Mickaelle Paty, one of the murdered teacher’s sisters, said his killing had highlighted the “depth of Islamist infiltration in France”.
In particular, the process should “enable our society to become aware of a deadly danger,” she added.
The trial will last until December 20.
Six former high school students were sentenced in December 2023 to prison terms ranging from fourteen months’ probation to six months’ imprisonment, following a closed-door trial in the juvenile court.
However, those sentenced to prison will ultimately serve no prison time.
Chnina’s daughter was sentenced to 18 months’ probation in that trial after being convicted of defamation in her suit against Paty.
Paty had used Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics course to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His murder took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Mohammed cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed the offices, killing 12 people.
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