Posted Apr 7, 2023, 2:01 PM
The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) is asking that 14 people be tried following the assassination, on October 16, 2020, of Samuel Paty. The history and geography professor had been beheaded by a radicalized Islamist, killed in the process by the police, near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines).
His murderer, Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old radicalized Russian refugee of Chechen origin, 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 “avenge the prophet”.
For this act which had caused a huge stir in France and abroad, the Pnat is asking for a trial at the assizes and that the most serious offense be retained, complicity in terrorist assassination, for two friends of the assailant. Azim Epsirkhanov and Naïm Boudaoud are suspected of having accompanied him to buy weapons, and for the second, of having gone with him to the college of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, being “fully aware of the ideological regimentation of ‘jihadist inspiration’ of their friend. They incur life imprisonment.
Children’s court for five college students
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 Mangel, a 30-year-old convert to Islam, linked on Twitter with the assassin in the days preceding the attack.
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 a source familiar with the matter.
The public prosecutor is also asking for a trial in juvenile court for five college students for criminal association with a view to preparing for aggravated violence, an offence. The Pnat also requires that the schoolgirl at the origin of the case appear before this court for slanderous denunciation.
Closed at the beginning of October, the investigations were then reopened for a few weeks, the time, according to a source close to the file, to check the timetable of those close to 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.