It was a killing that started with a lie. In October 2020, an Islamist terrorist tracked down and decapitated teacher Samuel Paty as he left school on the last day before half-term holidays, reports The Guardian.
In the days preceding his murder, Paty, 47, who taught geography and history, had been the subject of an intense campaign of online harassment sparked when a 13-year-old student claimed he had discriminated against his Muslim pupils during a class on moral and civic education.
The girl told her father Paty had instructed Muslim students to leave the classroom at the Bois-d’Aulne secondary school at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in the Paris suburbs while he showed students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
In truth, the girl was not in Paty’s class that day and had made up the story to cover the fact she had been suspended from school for bad behaviour.
Paty had used the images as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France and the question of “dilemmas”. He posed the question “to be or not to be Charlie?”, referring to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag used to express support for the paper after a terrorist attack on its offices in January 2015 that killed 12 people.
But Paty had not ordered any children to leave the room – instead he had told them they could turn away if they thought they would be offended by the images.
The teenager could not have known that the story she told her father would spark a chain of events that would lead an 18-year-old Chechen, Abdoullakh Anzorov, to travel 100 kilometres from his home in Normandy to kill the teacher after her furious father posted the lie on social media.