The barbaric murder of the teacher Samuel Paty in France three years ago left a deep wound that has not healed to this day. The verdicts expected this Friday in the first trial surrounding the Islamist-motivated act of terrorism are unlikely to change this. Six students who were said to have had something to do with the bloody crime had to stand trial before a Paris juvenile court.
On October 16, 2020, an 18-year-old killed and then beheaded the history teacher in a Paris suburb. The police shot the perpetrator, who had Russian-Chechen roots.
Young people in the dock
Before the crime, Paty had been criticized on the Internet because he had shown caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in class on the subject of freedom of expression. Five students are said to have helped the attacker recognize the 47-year-old teacher. The young people, who were 14 and 15 years old at the time of the crime, are accused of forming a criminal organization.
A then 13-year-old student has to answer for a false accusation that is said to have been the trigger for the crime. Accordingly, she talked about a presentation of the controversial cartoons at home, even though she wasn’t at school that day.
In France, children are generally considered to be of criminal responsibility from the age of 13. All defendants face up to two and a half years in prison. The public was excluded from the process. What the students said about what happened was not made public. The public will therefore only have further information about the circumstances that led to the crime at the end of 2024 at the trial of eight adult defendants. Some of them are said to have directly supported the attacker in preparing his crime.
Assassin offered 300 euros
The five accused students became assistants by chance, the magazine “L’Obs” reported, citing their interrogations. The attacker showed up at the school and offered one of the students 300 euros to show him who the teacher was. He spoke badly of Paty and stated that he wanted to force him to apologize to the Muslims. The student accepted the offer and enlisted a few comrades. The young people are said to have suspected that the assassin was up to no good – but they apparently had no idea about the murder plot.
Even before the trial began, France was once again shaken by a fatal attack on a teacher. On October 13, an Islamist radicalized 20-year-old stabbed a teacher to death in a school in Arras, northern France. The authorities had the young man in their sights as a threat. As with the brutal attack on Paty, France saw its secular state under attack and, in particular, a key pillar of it, the national education system. Some complained that the country had not managed to better protect its teachers within three years.
