At the trial for the assassination of Samuel Paty, the “modus operandi” of Islamist agitator Abdelhakim Sefrioui

Abdelhakim Sefrioui is first and foremost an ideology: political Islamism. It is also, and above all, in the context of the trial for the assassination of Samuel Paty, a mode of action: « menaces », « manipulation » et “mediatization” listed, Monday, November 25, an investigator from the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (SDAT) before the special assize court of Paris. With a goal: “Instrumentalize the values ​​of the Republic in a logic of conquest of institutions through the victimization of Muslims. »

But if this 65-year-old old backpacker of Islamist activism is being tried for “terrorist criminal association”, it is neither for his ideas nor for his methods, tested with impunity during long years of activism: it is because that both ultimately led to the beheading of a history and geography professor on October 16, 2020.

His case is one of the thorniest that anti-terrorism justice has had to judge. Abdelhakim Sefrioui never called for the assassination of Samuel Paty: he initiated, with the father of a schoolgirl, the hate campaign which would trigger a planned attack in the mind of a young jihadist. The question that arises in court is dizzying. Is the continuum between the activism of the first and the action of the second sufficient to convict the agitator for terrorism?

“A commitment against the Jews”

An activist for the Palestinian cause – he founded the Cheikh Yassine Collective in 2004, named after the founder of Hamas – Abdelhakim Sefrioui began his career by organizing demonstrations calling for the destruction of Israel. An activism that her daughter summed up before investigators as follows: “His commitment to Palestine was more of a commitment against the Jews. »

His activism then shifted, over the years, towards a denunciation of “ discriminations » targeting Muslims. The SDAT investigator illustrated this shift and its “methods of action” through several feats of arms. In April 2009, the agitator organized a stormy demonstration in front of the Grand Mosque of Paris to demand the departure of imam Dalil Boubakeur, who had declared that Hamas was “a danger for the Palestinians”.

In 2010, he increased the demonstrations in front of the Drancy mosque of imam Hassen Chalghoumi, which he described as“Imam of the Jews” and of “thug”a term that he would use ten years later to designate Samuel Paty. But it was in 2011 that he attacked school for the first time, by organizing a vast media campaign against a high school in Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis), where high school girls were allegedly threatened with expulsion for wearing an abaya.

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