PARIS: Six teenagers are on trial behind closed doors in Paris for their alleged involvement in the 2020 beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty, Al Jazeera has reported.
The murder of the history teacher occurred after the teacher showed his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression.The history teacher, 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.
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 with the killer in exchange for money; the names of the six youths cannot be revealed due to their age, reported Al Jazeera.
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”. The accused arrived at the courthouse in hoodies and masks to hide their identities. A girl, who was 13 at the time of the murder, allegedly told her parents that Paty had asked Muslim pupils to leave the room before showing the caricatures. “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. The hearings are due to last until December 8, with the trial being held behind closed doors throughout.
Eight adults are also accused and will appear before a special criminal court. 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 last month.
Bernard’s suspected killer, Mohammed Moguchkov, also hails from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus region, similar to Paty’s killer, Abdoullakh Anzorov.
Anzorov targeted Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class the cartoons. They were originally featured in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, triggering a deadly attack by gunmen, Al Jazeera reported. (ANI)