Trial Begins for Adults Involved in Murder of French Teacher

AP Photo/Lewis Joly

Samuel Paty was a French teacher who was stabbed and beheaded by an Islamic extremist after he showed some Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed to his class. The attacker was killed by police the day of the attack, but some of the teens involved in the case were tried and convicted last year.

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Five of the teens on trial, who were 14 or 15 at the time of Paty's murder, were being tried for criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence.

They were accused of having been on the lookout for Paty and identifying him to the killer in exchange for money. 

Four of them received suspended sentences of between 14 and 18 months.

This week, eight adults involved in the case are being tried, including a parent who helped bring the teacher to the attention of extremists based on a lie told by his daughter.

Eight people are going on trial in Paris on terrorism charges Monday over the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty...

Much attention at the trial will focus on Brahim Chnina, the Muslim father of a 13-year-old girl who claimed that she had been excluded from Paty’s class when he showed the caricatures on Oct. 5, 2020.

Chnina sent a series of messages to his contacts denouncing Paty, saying that “this sick man” needed to be fired, along with the address of the school in the Paris suburb of Conflans Saint-Honorine.

In reality, Chnina’s daughter had lied to him and had never attended the lesson in question...

Chnina will be tried for alleged association with a terrorist enterprise for targeting the 47-year-old teacher through false information.

The other major figure in this trial is Abdelhakim Sefrioui who ran a pro-Hamas group which he launched in 2004. He filmed a video with Chnina in front of the school which helped his claims go viral. They each face up to 30 years if convicted.

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Also on trial are two of the attackers friends who allegedly helped him buy the knife and a pellet gun prior to the attack. They claim they didn't know the killer was planning to commit the attack. Both of them face life if convicted. The other four individuals on trial all communicated with the killer on Snapchat prior to the attack. They also claim they didn't know he was intent on violence.

The killing of Samuel Paty made a big impact on France but unfortunately, there was a very similar attack carried out almost exactly three years later.

,,,just three days before the country was set to mark the somber anniversary of a teacher’s gruesome beheading by an Islamist extremist, an eerily similar attack hit at home as a man used a knife to kill a teacher and injure three other people at a school in northern France in what officials called an Islamist terrorist attack...

The suspected attacker, Mohammed Mogushkov, 20, is in custody, along with his 16-year-old brother, who is suspected of assisting him, and a cousin, who knew of a potential plot but did not warn the authorities, said Jean-François Ricard, the country’s top antiterrorism prosecutor.

Mr. Mogushkov pledged allegiance to the Islamic State shortly before the attack in an audio recording that investigators later found on a cellphone he had bought that morning, Mr. Ricard said....

The horror unfurled on Friday morning at Gambetta-Carnot, a large public school in the city’s center.Carrying two knives, the assailant attacked two professors as they were leaving the school, and then searched frantically through the building, asking for the principal or a history professor. His bloody rampage led him into the school’s inner courtyard, where many young children were waiting for the cafeteria to open. Witnesses heard him shout “God is great” in Arabic during the attack.

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France has experienced a lot of Islamic hatred over the past decade. I'll be glad to see some of the perpetrators go to prison, but I'm not very hopeful that convictions in the Samuel Paty case will make much difference to the next round of extremists whose only goal in life is to murder for their religion.

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