The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) is asking that fourteen people be tried after the assassination, on October 16, 2020, of Samuel Paty, a history and geography professor who was beheaded by a radicalized Islamist shot dead by the police, learned the Agence France-Presse on Friday April 7 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 claimed responsibility for his action, congratulating himself on having “avenged the prophet”.
For this act which had caused a huge stir in France and abroad, the PNAT requests that the most serious offence, complicity in terrorist assassination, be retained only for two friends of the assailant Abdoullakh Anzorov. Azim E. and Naïm B. accompanied him to buy a knife. The second had gone with him to the college of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
The public prosecutor also requires the assizes for six other adults and requests that six college students be tried for offenses. 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 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.
Closed in early 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 now up to the counter-terrorism investigating judges to make a final decision on whether to commit these people to trial.
