French teacher beheaded: the anti-terrorist prosecution calls for 14 people to be tried

BET À DAY

The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) calls for 14 people to be tried after the assassination on October 16, 2020 of Samuel Paty, professor of history and geography beheaded by a radicalized Islamist killed in the aftermath by the police , AFP learned on Friday from a source familiar with the matter. 

On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin. The 18-year-old man, radicalized, accused him of having shown caricatures of Muhammad in class. In an audio message in Russian, he had claimed responsibility for his gesture, congratulating himself on having “avenged the prophet”.

For this act which had aroused immense commotion in France and abroad, the Pnat asks for a trial at the assizes and that the most serious offense be retained, complicity in terrorist assassination, only for two friends of the assailant.

Azim E. and Naïm B. accompanied him to buy a knife. The second had gone with him to the college of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

Brahim Chnina, father of a schoolgirl targeted by an exclusion for indiscipline and who claimed to have attended the course, and the sulphurous Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui, authors of videos on social networks which had fueled the controversy, had been indicted for complicity , just like Priscilla M., a 30-year-old convert to Islam, linked on Twitter with the assassin in the days preceding the attack.

But for these three people, as for three other adults, the Pnat finally requests a trial, also at the assizes, for criminal terrorist association, according to the source familiar with the matter.

The public prosecutor is also requesting a trial in juvenile court for five college students for criminal association with a view to preparing aggravated violence, an offence.

The Pnat requires that the schoolgirl at the origin of the case also appear before this court for slanderous denunciation, still according to the source close to the file.< /p>

Closed at the beginning of October, the investigations were then reopened for a few weeks, the time, according to a source familiar with the matter, to check the schedule of relatives of Abdoullakh Anzorov.

It is up to now it is up to the counter-terrorism investigating judges to make a final decision on whether to commit these people to trial.