Eight adults, seven men and one woman, accused of having contributed to the hate campaign which led to the assassination on October 16, 2020 of history and geography professor Samuel Paty, have been on trial since Monday before the special assize court from Paris. The trial is scheduled until December 20.
The assassin, a young 18-year-old Russian radical Islamist of Chechen origin, beneficiary of asylum seeker status in France, will be largely absent from the trial: he was killed by the police shortly after having stabbed and beheaded the professor. in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the Paris region.
Two young friends of the attacker must answer for “complicity in terrorist assassination”, a crime punishable by life imprisonment. The six other defendants, three of whom are under judicial supervision, appear free, are being tried for participation in a criminal terrorist association, a crime punishable by 30 years of criminal imprisonment.
Those who relayed false claims
Among the accused are a 52-year-old Moroccan, the father of the 13-year-old schoolgirl who falsely claimed – she was absent from class – that Samuel Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his class before showing caricatures of Mohammed , and a 65-year-old Franco-Moroccan Islamist activist.
These two men, in pre-trial detention for four years, massively relayed the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecution, of “designating a target”, “arousing a feeling of hatred” and “thus prepare several crimes. They are both accused of participation in a terrorist criminal association.
The 13-year-old schoolgirl and five other former schoolboys were sentenced last fall to sentences ranging from 14 months suspended to two years including six months suspended following a closed trial before the children’s court. .
>> To find out more, read: The verdict is in for 6 young people involved in the assassination of Samuel Paty in France
For “awareness in the face of mortal danger”
This public hearing “must not only result in the severe condemnation of those who participated in it, but also raise awareness in our society in the face of mortal danger”, hope the lawyers for the family of the murdered professor.
The hearing chaired by Franck Zientara, an experienced magistrate who notably led the trial of the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray attack, the assassination of a priest by two radical Islamists near Rouen in 2016, takes place in the “major trials” room of the Paris courthouse, where the jihadist attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris took place, as well as those of July 14, 2016 in Nice.
The trial is also an opportunity to evoke the figure of Samuel Paty, a man “lonely, frightened, in dire straits”, according to the investigating magistrates. “I am threatened by local Islamists,” he wrote to his colleagues four days after his course on freedom of expression. However, at no time did the threatened teacher benefit from police protection.
>> Listen to the subject of Tout un monde on the trials linked to the assassination of Samuel Paty:
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