Another trial, for the eight adults involved in this case, is scheduled for the end of 2024.
The trial of six former college students tried for their involvement in the 2020 assassination of professor Samuel Paty by a young jihadist began this Monday in Paris before the children’s court, behind closed doors.
Another trial, for the eight adults involved in this case, is scheduled for the end of 2024.
The young defendants arrived at court shortly before 9 a.m., their faces hidden under their coats, some wearing sunglasses or surgical masks, accompanied by their parents and their lawyers.
The first two days of the hearing must be devoted to their life stories and personalities.
They were preceded in the courtroom by relatives of Samuel Paty, including his parents and around ten of his former colleagues, who asked to become civil parties despite the opposition of the anti-terrorism prosecution.
The court decided that it would decide the issue later, with the merits of the case.
Teachers will therefore be able to attend the trial, scheduled until December 8. “It’s a relief, we’ve been waiting for this for three years, to hear from our students,” a literature teacher testified in the courtroom.
“We need to understand,” added another, an English teacher.
National Education has also become a civil party, Minister Gabriel Attal told AFP, “to forcefully reaffirm our desire to defend the values of the Republic that Samuel Paty embodied, but also to express my unwavering support for the entire teaching staff.
Immense emotion
The trial is being held behind closed doors given the young age of the defendants at the time of the events – between 13 and 15 years old.
Only people directly affected by the case can attend the hearing. The press does not have access to the room and is prohibited from reporting what is said during the debates, even via the words of the lawyers.
The attack against Samuel Paty caused immense emotion in France and abroad: on October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine ( Yvelines) by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin.
This 18-year-old radicalized Islamist was killed immediately by the police.
He criticized the professor for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson on freedom of expression. In an audio message in Russian, he congratulated himself on having “avenged the Prophet”.
The emotion caused by this crime was reignited by the assassination in mid-October of another professor, Dominique Bernard, killed in Arras by a young radicalized Islamist.
The teenagers prosecuted, now high school students, face two and a half years of imprisonment.
Five of them, aged 14 and 15, are on trial for conspiracy to commit aggravated violence. They are accused of having monitored the surroundings of the college and designated Mr. Paty as the attacker, for remuneration.
“Irreparable”
“He is consumed by remorse,” said Me Antoine Ory about his client, who had just entered the room. “He is terrified, very worried about finding himself face to face with Samuel Paty’s family” for the first time.
A sixth teenager, 13 years old at the time of the events, appears for slanderous denunciation.
She arrived in the room with her head completely hidden in the hood of her black down jacket. This schoolgirl had wrongly claimed that Mr. Paty had asked the Muslim students in the class to report and leave the class before showing the caricatures of Mohammed. She hadn’t actually attended this class.
His lie was at the origin of a violent campaign fueled on social networks by his father, Brahim Chnina, and by an Islamist activist, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, author of videos which had drawn attention to the professor. They will be judged during the second trial.
“The defense will unsurprisingly plead youthful error” but this trial is “highly anticipated for those seeking to understand the real causes which led these schoolchildren on the path to irreparable”, declared before the opening of the debates Louis Cailliez, lawyer for Mickaëlle Paty, one of the sisters of the murdered professor.
The investigation made it possible to trace how, in ten days, the trap had closed on Samuel Paty: from the lie of the schoolgirl to the online attacks, until the arrival of the attacker in front of the school on October 16, where he gave 300 euros to college students to identify Mr. Paty whom he wanted to “film apologizing”.
During auditions where they collapsed in tears, these college students swore they had imagined that the professor would at most be “posted on the networks”, perhaps “humiliated”, “hit”… but “never” that it would go “until death”.