At 4.55pm on Friday October 16th, the owner of Twitter account @Tchetchene_270 posted a photo of a decapitated head on a tarmac road. This terrible image was accompanied by the words: “From Abdullah, the servant of Allah, to Marcon (sic), the leader of the infidels, I have executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammed, calm his fellow people before we inflict harsh retribution on you”.
At that time the terrorist – now identified as Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A. - had just decapitated history and geography teacher Samuel Paty close to the middle school where he had taught at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine north-west of Paris, and where he had shown pupils caricatures of Muhammad as part of a lesson. The attacker then took the time to post online his gruesome claim of responsibility for the act he had just committed.
When a follower quickly asked whose head it was, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A. replied: “It's Mr Paty.”
A few minutes after these Tweets, and just 200 metres away from where the murder took place, the 18-year-old Russian-born Chechen was confronted by officers from Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. He is reported to have shouted out “Allahu Akbar” or “God is Great” before firing five times with a airsoft-style air pistol. Three officers responded with live rounds and shot him. The terrorist fell to the ground but is said to have tried to get up and stab the officers before being “neutralised”. His body had been hit by nine bullets.
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It was during a press conference on Saturday afternoon that the anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard revealed Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A.'s identity and said that the 18-year-old Russian had been born in Moscow, was of Chechen origin and had been living at Évreux in Normandy, about 90km or 55 miles west of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. The prosecutor said the youth had refugee status and had been granted a ten-year residence permit on March 4th 2030. He had never been convicted of an offence, though he had come to the attention of the authorities over incidents of vandalism as a juvenile, and was unknown to the security services.
France's anti-terrorism prosecution unit the Parquet National Antiterroriste (PNAT) has taken over the case and begun an investigation for “murder linked to a terrorist enterprise” and “a terrorist criminal conspiracy”. Detectives from the police's anti-terrorist squad the Sous-direction Anti-terroriste (SDAT) and agents from the domestic intelligence agency the DGSI will be involved in the investigation. Jean-François Ricard said one of their tasks would be to find out “how the perpetrator had prepared his crime”. He revealed that Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A. had been seen in front of the school on Friday afternoon where he had asked pupils to point out the teacher to him.
The prosecutors also said that an initial examination of the terrorist's phone revealed that the text of the message posted on Twitter account @Tchetchene_270 had been recorded as notes on the phone at 12.17pm on Friday, and that the photograph of the victim, taken at 4.57pm, was also on the phone.
According to Mediapart's information the authorities became aware of the decapitation photo at 5.10pm on Friday, just under a quarter of an hour after it was posted on Twitter. In a grim detail, it was the presence of a surgical mask drenched in blood hanging around the head of the victim and also the tarmac of the road surface in the background that indicated to detectives that the image was of a recent decapitation in Europe.
The second tweet from account @Tchetchene_270 mentioning the name of the teacher – whose identity was then unknown to investigators - did not help the authorities. The breakthrough came thanks to an earlier video posted on YouTube by the father of a pupil who had been angry that a teacher – with the same name as that cited by the Twitter account – had shown his 13-year-old pupils a photo of a naked man and told them it was of Muhammad. The connection between the Tweet, the decapitation and the teacher's lesson on freedom of expression at the middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine was quickly made.
By 6.30pm on Friday the PNAT had begun its investigation.
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Mediapart has learnt that some internet users had already come across the @Tchetchene_270 account in August 30th this year when it posted a photomontage depicting the mock decapitation of a man that Mediapart has been unable to identity. However, the background image has clearly been taken from a scene in the epic Turkish drama series Diriliş: Ertuğrul which tells the story of Ertuğrul Gazi, the father of Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire.
The account holder - Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A. - had quickly deleted this disturbing Tweet, and no other details about the account and its existing content gave an indication that its owner would take violent action in this way, or that teacher Samuel Paty was a target.
However, at the end of July an internet user had used France's dedicated online portal for reporting online content, known as PHAROS, to flag alleged “advocacy of violence, incitement to hatred, homophobia and racism” in the Twitter account. Mediapart understands that the account had in fact been flagged to PHAROS several times in recent months.
'Tensions were calming down'
Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A.'s Twitter account shows that he had a close interest in religion. At the start of October he had posted a video featuring a Dua, a prayer of supplication in Islam, in both Arabic and Russia. On October 1st 2020, before the controversy over the lesson on freedom of expression at the school, the young Russian had Tweeted a nasheed or piece of music Ya Fawza Manal Shahadah Ta Sadiqan which eulogises martyrdom and which is considered to be one of Islamic State's religious chants.
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These were the only four Tweets that were still accessible late on Friday afternoon before the account was deleted. It seems as though Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A. had cleaned up the account before going off to commit murder.
But an examination of the followers and friends of Twitter account @Tchetchene_270 - 'Tchétchène' is the French word for Chechen – help sketch the outline of a young man faithful to his origins and deeply anchored in religion and probably jihad.
A number of these friends or followers show a similar background or interests to Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A, from Abou Tchétchène to Ismaïl Ash-Shishani, Le_Tchétchène957 and TchétchèneM. The Twitter account @BarbeNoire has the enigmatic words: “We have a meeting soon, Patience Muslims JUSTICE will be done.” On Lumber J@ck's account are the words: “To the rabble: if you don't believe that violence solves anything that's because you haven't hit hard enough. An Eye for an Eye.” Hulker57, based at Rennes in west France, defines himself as a “homophobe and anti-Semite”. Khidji says that he lives in the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” – which was how the Taliban styled the state when it ran the country – while Abou Talha lives in what he calls the “Dar al Kufr” or land of non-believers.
The Twitter handles of some of the followers are themselves worrying, such as 'AminAttaque' and 'MartyrFassi'. Another calls himself Al-Battar which is both a reference to the Prophet Muhammad's sword and also a well-known and bloodthirsty Islamic State armed group or katibat to which several perpetrators of the November 2015 Paris attacks and the suicide bomb attacks in Brussels in March 2016 had belonged.
In addition to the terrorist's past and his preparation for the crime, the investigation will also have to work out the circumstances which led a radicalised youth of 18 living in Normandy to attack a 47-year-old teacher and father of one who was going home on the eve of the school holidays.
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Samuel Paty had caused controversy among some the parents of some pupils at the school when he had shown a class caricatures of Muhammad as part of a class on freedom of expression.
The parent of one child said via Facebook and a YouTube video posted on October 8th, that the teacher – whom he identified in one message - had shown his pupils a photo of a naked man and told them that it was the Prophet. “What message did he want to give to these pupils?” wrote the man at the time. “Why this hate? Why does a history teacher behave like that in front of his 13-year-old pupils?”
This father had not heeded attempts by the school's principal to “calm things down” and reported the matter to the police, complaining that child pornography was being disseminated. This led to the teacher, Samuel Paty, being questioned; after discovering the online videos and that he had been named, the teacher himself reported the father for public defamation. The father and his daughter were summoned to the police station for questioning on October 14th but did not turn up, prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said on Saturday.
After the school received “many threatening calls” the principal met parents – except the father who had posted the videos – and according to the prosecutor “tensions were calming down”.
Jean-François Ricard also stated that nine people were being held in connection with the investigation, with a tenth and eleventh confirmed later. Four of these were in Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A.'s “family circle”. Two people had spontaneously gone to the police station because they had been in contact with the terrorist just before the murder. Among the other three people was the father who had complained about the teacher and identified him on social media.
Two further people being questioned are a man who appeared in videos with the disgruntled father and the man's partner, who were arrested at Évry south of Paris. This man, according to prosecutors, is known to intelligence services.
The anti-terrorism prosecutor also stated that Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A.'s “half-sister” had “joined the Islamic State organisation in Syria in 2014 and that she is subject to an arrest warrant from an anti-terrorist investigating judge”.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter