A Paris court on Friday convicted eight people for their roles in the events that led to the killing of Samuel Paty, a history teacher whose stabbing and decapitation by an Islamist terrorist in 2020 deeply shocked France.
Mr. Paty was slain in October 2020 near his school northwest of Paris by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent who was angered by the teacher’s display of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate free speech in an eighth-grade civics class. The police shot and killed Mr. Anzorov shortly after the violent assault.
The teacher’s killing came after larger terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016 that together killed hundreds of people. Mr. Paty’s death also deeply unsettled the country and fed worries that France’s public-school teachers — who play a crucial role in imparting the French Republic’s values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism — were increasingly under threat from attacks by Islamist extremists.
Those fears were heightened last year, when another teacher was killed in eerily similar circumstances in northern France.
The verdict on Friday involved the trial of eight people, including Naïm Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, friends of Mr. Anzorov who were accused of helping him procure a knife and two pellet guns for his attack. Mr. Boudaoud was also accused of driving Mr. Anzorov to a point near the school. Both pleaded not guilty, arguing they had no previous knowledge of Mr. Anzorov’s plans.
Two other defendants, who also pleaded not guilty, were accused of fueling an online smear campaign against Mr. Paty that ultimately caught the attention of the killer, who lived about 50 miles away from the school.
Four other defendants were accused of encouraging Mr. Anzorov’s attack and glorifying it on social media.
Mr. Paty’s killing was the result of a chain reaction set off by one of his students, who was 13 at the time. During the week of Mr. Paty’s civics class, she told her parents that he had asked Muslim students to leave the room when he displayed the caricatures, and that she had been expelled from school when she protested that he was being discriminatory.
In fact, she had lied, and was convicted last year of making false accusations against Mr. Paty. She had not attended that class. Mr. Paty had not ordered Muslim students to leave, but had said that students who wanted to could avert their gaze or temporarily step outside the classroom. And her two-day expulsion was for unrelated and repeated misbehavior at school.
But in the hands of adults who believed her at the time, what started as an attempt to cover disciplinary failings quickly morphed into something else.
Prosecutors charged her father, Brahim Chnina, 52, and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, 65, an activist, with spurring the online smear campaign against Mr. Paty; the court found that the two men had spread false claims and personal information about Mr. Paty in the week before his killing.
Neither knew Mr. Paty’s killer personally or had met him; nor were they accused of being aware of his plot. But Mr. Chnina sent a flurry of messages and posted two videos accusing Mr. Paty on social media. Mr. Sefrioui posted his own video several days later.
Both described Mr. Paty as a “thug” in their videos and called for him to be punished. Mr. Chnina and his daughter also filed a police report against the teacher.
During the trial, which began in November, witnesses and investigators painted a portrait of Mr. Chnina as a pious Muslim who was not known to espouse extreme views or be affiliated with any extreme groups. He was mainly devoted to an organization that helped people with physical disabilities go on pilgrimages to Mecca, and he was active on social media to promote it, with an extensive contact list.
Mr. Sefrioui was a longtime pro-Palestinian activist who led a group named after the founder of Hamas that was disbanded after Mr. Paty’s killing. Investigators and witnesses described him as an Islamist agitator who misrepresented himself as a leading French imam and who was adept at stirring unrest and unruly protests. Mr. Sefrioui, whose self-assuredness and emphatic denial of any wrongdoing elicited murmurs of disapproval from the courtroom audience, rejected that description,
Asked by the presiding judge if he believed that he had any responsibility in the “causal chain” of events that led to Mr. Paty’s death, Mr. Sefrioui said, “I’m not in the chain at all.” Mr. Sefrioui’s lawyers argued that there was no proof, for instance, that Mr. Paty’s killer had even seen Mr. Sefrioui’s video.
The caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that Mr. Paty showed his students had originally been published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — itself the target of a massacre in 2015. A month before he was killed, the magazine had republished the caricatures, leading to protests in Muslim countries, new terrorist threats against France and a knife attack near the magazine’s former offices.
Prosecutors said it would have been clear to the defendants that targeting Mr. Paty online, even without openly calling for him to be harmed, would act like a dog whistle for would-be terrorists like Mr. Anzorov.
Defense lawyers called that argument an unreasonable legal stretch.
“It’s true that I went too fast, that I didn’t think straight, and didn’t think of the risks,” Mr. Chnina, gaunt and looking tired, told the court. But, he added, “I am not a terrorist.”
After Mr. Paty’s death, President Emmanuel Macron of France eulogized him as a “quiet hero.” At the trial, Mr. Paty’s family and former partner gave heart-wrenching testimony about the man — describing him as a son raised by two public-school teachers with an “all-consuming” passion for history; a brother who loved to debate and who helped his nieces with homework; a doting father; and a voracious reader, whose extensive book collection, including the Quran, spilled into his kitchen.
He was curious, tolerant and loved to teach, they said, adding that he had told none of them that he was worried about his safety after the videos and messages against him went viral. Insulting messages and death threats targeting him had also arrived by phone or email at his school.
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