Defendants face verdict for actions that led to beheading

Eight people accused of complicity in the jihadist murder of French professor Samuel Paty will learn their fate after a six-week trial in a Paris court.

Among them is the father of a schoolgirl whose lie about Paty’s alleged discrimination against Muslims in the classroom set in motion the events that led to her beheading on a street in October 2020.

Also on trial are a Muslim activist who led an online campaign against Paty, two childhood friends of Chechen killer Abdoullakh Anzorov, who allegedly helped him acquire weapons, and four radicalized men with whom he exchanged messages on social media.

Anzorov was shot dead by police minutes after killing the 47-year-old history and geography teacher outside his high school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorine.

He was excited by claims circulating on the Internet that a few days earlier Paty had ordered Muslims to leave his class of 13-year-olds before revealing obscene photographs of the Prophet Muhammad.

In fact, Paty had been giving a lesson on freedom of expression and before showing one of the controversial images first published by Charlie Hebdo magazine, she advised the students to look away if they feared being offended.

The schoolgirl, named Z. Chnina, was not even in class when this happened, but she told her father that she had been punished for raising an objection.

The trial centered on legal arguments over whether people who had no prior knowledge of the attack – or in some cases even its perpetrator – could, in their words, be guilty of “terrorist association”.

Summing up in court this week, prosecution lawyers sought jail terms of between 18 months suspended and 16 years for the defendants, saying their actions had indirectly led to the atrocity.

However, prosecutors had also angered members of Paty’s family by refusing to demand maximum sentences and by downgrading some of the charged crimes.

During the trial, the court heard the first public testimony of the girl, Z. Chnina, who is now 17 years old.

A year ago, a juvenile court, whose hearings were held behind closed doors, handed him a short suspended sentence for defamation.

“I want to apologize to the entire (Paty family) because if it weren’t for my lies they wouldn’t be here today,” he said between sobs.

“And I want to apologize to my father because when he made the video it was partly because of my lie.”

In the days after Paty’s free speech class, her father, Brahim Chnina, made videos denouncing the teacher by name. He also had the help of activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui to spread the campaign through his social network.

Chnina and Sefrioui never requested action against Paty and were unaware of Anzorov’s existence until the murder occurred.

But for the prosecution, they were equally guilty of “terrorist association” because they knew the possible consequences of their campaign.

“No one says that they wanted the death of Samuel Paty, but by lighting 1,000 digital fuses they knew that one of them would provoke jihadist violence against the professor,” according to the prosecutor’s letter.

The context of October 2020 was one of intense tensions due to jihadist violence, after Charlie Hebdo republished some of the controversial cartoons of Muhammad. Five years earlier, most of the magazine’s staff had been killed in a jihadist gun attack on its Paris office.

Longer prison sentences were sought in court this week for Anzorov’s two friends who accompanied him when he bought a fake knife and gun. One of them also took Anzorov to school the afternoon of the attack.

None of these defendants is a radicalized Muslim and it was not established in court that they knew of Anzorov’s plans.

For this reason, the prosecution dismissed the charge against him of “complicity in a terrorist attack”, which carries a possible sentence of life in prison.

The other four defendants are people Anzorov conversed with on chat lines, again without him revealing his intention to kill Paty.

One of them, a convert to Islam named Priscilla Mangel, admitted to making “provocative” comments online about the Paty case, but said she never would have made them if she had known Anzorov’s intentions.

“For me it was an anodyne discussion with an anonymous person.”

For the defense lawyers, none of the defendants would have faced criminal proceedings for what they said, if it had not been for the murder of Paty.

So the key legal question facing the court is whether the statements can become illegal depending on what follows.