French Court Convicts 8 People Tied to Events Leading to Teacher’s Beheading

A Paris court docket on Friday convicted eight folks for his or her roles within the occasions that led to the killing of Samuel Paty, a historical past trainer whose stabbing and decapitation by an Islamist terrorist in 2020 deeply shocked France.

Mr. Paty was slain in October 2020 close to his faculty northwest of Paris by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent who was angered by the trainer’s show of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as an instance free speech in an eighth-grade civics class. The police shot and killed Mr. Anzorov shortly after the violent assault.

The trainer’s killing got here after bigger terrorist assaults in France in 2015 and 2016 that collectively killed a whole bunch of individuals. Mr. Paty’s loss of life additionally deeply unsettled the nation and fed worries that France’s public-school lecturers — who play a vital function in imparting the French Republic’s values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism — had been more and more underneath risk from assaults by Islamist extremists.

Those fears had been heightened final yr, when one other trainer was killed in eerily comparable circumstances in northern France.

The verdict on Friday concerned the trial of eight folks, together with Naïm Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, pals of Mr. Anzorov who had been accused of serving to him procure a knife and two pellet weapons for his assault. Mr. Boudaoud was additionally accused of driving Mr. Anzorov to a degree close to the college. Both pleaded not responsible, arguing that they had no earlier information of Mr. Anzorov’s plans.

Two different defendants, who additionally pleaded not responsible, had been accused of fueling an internet smear marketing campaign in opposition to Mr. Paty that in the end caught the eye of the killer, who lived about 50 miles away from the college.