The trial began in Paris on Monday of six teenagers connected to events leading to the beheading of Samuel Paty in 2020, in a case that horrified France, reports The Guardian.
The 47-year-old history teacher was stabbed and then decapitated near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a radicalised 18-year-old who arrived in France aged six with his Chechen parents and had been granted asylum.
Anzorov, who was later shot dead at the scene by police, killed Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Paty had used the magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France. Weeks before the class, Charlie Hebdo had republished the cartoons. The magazine had first published the images in 2012. In 2015 radicalised gunmen stormed its Paris office, killing 11 people inside, and a police officer outside, in coordinated terrorist attacks which also resulted in a second police officer being killed and four hostages murdered at a kosher supermarket.
The teenagers will be tried behind closed doors in juvenile court, without the media present.
One of the teenagers on trial is a girl, who was 13 at the time of Paty’s death, who has been seen as central to the events.
She is accused of making a “false accusation” for wrongly saying that Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the classroom before he showed the cartoons.