France: The trial of the six former students accused of beheading Professor Chamiel Patty has begun

The trial of six former students accused of participating in the murder of the French teacher began today behind closed doors History and Geography Samiel Pati in 2020 by a young jihadist.

The trial is being held in Paris in a juvenile court, according to a judicial source.

The young defendants arrived at court with their faces hidden in their coats and entered the courtroom, where they are to be tried until December 8.

Another trial for the adults involved in this casewhich shocked France and the international community, is scheduled to take place at the end of 2024.

The 47-year-old professor was repeatedly stabbed and then beheaded near the secondary school where he worked in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorin.

The offender, an 18-year-old refugee of Chechen origin, Abdullah Anzorov, he fell dead on the spot from police bullets.

The young radicalized Islamist murdered Pati after messages circulated on social media that Pati had shown his students satirical sketches of the prophet Muhammad from the French weekly Charlie Hebdo.

Pati had used the magazine as part of an ethics lesson to discuss with his students freedom of speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and the cartoons satirizing religious figures has a long history.

His assassination took place just a few weeks ago after Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons.

When the magazine first published the sketches in 2015, armed Islamists stormed his offices and killed 12 people.

Last month, another professor, Dominique Bernard, was murdered in Arras, northern France, by another young radicalized Islamist.

Like Anzorov, so did the perpetrator of Bernard’s murder, Mohammed Mogutskov, also hail from the predominantly Muslim Russian region of the North Caucasus.

The role of minors

Five of the teenagers on trial, who were 14 or 15 years old when the crime was committed, will be tried in juvenile court on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit violence.

They are accused of watching Pati’s footsteps and that they pointed him out to his murderer in exchange for money.

A sixth teenager, who was 13 at the time, is charged with false accusation because he said that Pati had asked his Muslim students to leave the room before showing the sketches.

Pati’s family considers the teenagers’ trial crucial, according to Virginie Leroy, a lawyer representing his parents and one of his sisters.

“The role of minors was instrumental in the sequence of events that led to his murder,” he stated.

During the questioning, the teenagers testified that they thought the worst that could happen was for Pati to be “stigmatized on social media”. to “humiliate” even “eat wood”, but they never imagined that things would “come to the point of murder”.

Today they are high school students and face up to 2.5 years in prison.

“It’s complicated. This is going to follow him for the rest of his life,” commented Dylan Slama, an attorney for one of the defendants.