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CRIME

What we know about the murder of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty

France has been paying tribute to schoolteacher Samuel Paty - one year on from his shocking murder, this is what we know about what happened.

A banner expressing solidarity after the murder of Samuel Paty
A banner expressing solidarity after the murder of Samuel Paty. Photo: Joel Saget/AFP

It was a crime that sent shockwaves through France, already reeling from multiple previous terror attacks, and came to be seen as an attack on the fundamental values of the country itself.

Here is what happened:

The attack

On Friday, October 16th, 47-year-old Samuel Paty was leaving the school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine where he taught history and geography.

As he left the school in the quiet suburb about 20km from Paris, he was attacked and beheaded. 

His killer was shot by police shortly after the attack and died.

Relatives and colleagues holding a picture of Samuel Paty. Photo by Bertrand GUAY / AFP

The background

It was later revealed that Paty was not a random victim, but had been the subject of an online hate campaign sparked by a civics lesson he had taught at the beginning of October.

In the lesson, which discussed issues around free speech, he showed several cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and the background to the 2015 Islamist terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebo, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, killing 12 people and injuring 11 more.

The killer

Paty’s attacker was 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdullakh Anzorov, who had travelled 80km from his home in Normandy to commit the atrocity.

Anzorov arrived in France with his family more than a decade earlier. According to anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard, he had been granted refugee status in France and received a 10-year residency permit earlier in 2020.

He had no previous connection to the school and had apparently become aware of it through the online hate campaign waged against Paty.

The hate campaign

Although Anzorov died at the scene, three people are currently on trial over Paty’s death – a pupil in his class, the pupil’s father and a local imam.

The court hearings are still ongoing but it appears that the pupil, 13 years old at the time of the attack, had been excluded from school for two days for bad behaviour.

Fearful of getting into trouble, she told her father that she had been excluded because she objected to the showing of the cartoons in Paty’s class. A class, it later turned out, that she had not attended.

The father believed her account and posted several furious videos on social media, denouncing Paty for insults to the Prophet and discrimination against his Muslim daughter.

In some of the later videos he is joined by Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a local imam who was already on a police watchlist for his extremist Islamist views.

It was these videos that apparently prompted Anzorov to travel from Normandy and stage the horrific attack.

Sefrioui and the girl’s father are both in custody charged with conspiracy to murder while the girl, who now attends a different school, is charged with slanderous denunciation. All three have stated that they deeply regret their actions and have apologised to Paty’s friends and family for what happened.

One year on from the attack, France on Saturday and Sunday staged a number of memorials and events in the name of Samuel Paty.

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CRIME

Detectives return to French village to solve missing toddler mystery

Investigators cordoned off a tiny village in the French Alps on Thursday to solve the mystery of a missing toddler whose disappearance last summer gripped the nation.

Detectives return to French village to solve missing toddler mystery

Emile, two-and-a-half, was staying with his grandparents for the first day of the summer holidays when he disappeared on July 8th last year.

Two neighbours last saw him in the late afternoon walking alone on a street in Haut-Vernet, a small settlement of 25 inhabitants at an altitude of around 1,200 metres.

The little boy, barely 90 cm (35 inches) tall, was wearing a yellow T-shirt, white shorts and tiny hiking shoes, according to a call for witnesses at the time.

A massive on-the-ground search involving dozens of police and soldiers, sniffer dogs, a helicopter and drones failed to find him in July.

It was called off after several days following a prosecutor saying it was unlikely such a young child would have survived in the summer heat.

An initial probe into a missing person soon became a criminal investigation into a possible abduction. But the options of an accident or a fall remain open.

French investigators have summoned 17 people, including family members, neighbours and witnesses, to re-enact the events of the day he disappeared.

They are to focus on the last few minutes during which Emile was seen by neighbours, trying to untangle their contradictory accounts.

The family’s “only hope is that the child is still alive, even if this hope fades from day to day,” the grandfather’s lawyer said.

To ensure no outside interference in the investigation, police cordoned off the village from the outside world on Wednesday morning. It will remain so until Friday morning.

Flights over the village are also forbidden.

Early on Wednesday morning, around 15 journalists huddled in the cold rain at the barrier cutting off access to the village, kept at bay by two police cars.

Some 20 investigators are to guide the re-enactment of events, with some flying drones above to film it all.

The boy’s grandfather was questioned in a 1990s case into alleged violence and sexual aggression at a private Catholic school, it has emerged.

But a source close to the case said his possible involvement in the disappearance had always been examined to “the same degree” as other hypotheses.

Emile had just arrived in Haut-Vernet to stay with his mother’s parents in their holiday home for the summer when he went missing.

His parents, devout Catholics living in the southern town of La Bouilladisse, were not present on that day.

His mother is the oldest of 10 children.

Emile was her first child and she also has a younger daughter.

Investigators received some 900 calls from members of the public in the case, all of which have been dismissed as unrelated.

They have also sifted through endless mobile data and call logs in the hope of finding a clue.

In late November, a day before Emile would have turned three, his parents published a call for answers in a Christian weekly.

“Tell us where he is,” they wrote.

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