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CRIME

14 to face trial over beheading of French teacher

French prosecutors are seeking to try 14 people over the beheading of a teacher by an Islamic extremist in 2020, a crime that shocked France, a source close to the case told AFP on Friday.

Published: 7 April 2023 13:59 CEST
14 to face trial over beheading of French teacher
Flowers are laid in front of a tribute to French history and geography teacher Samuel Paty. Photo by Alain JOCARD / AFP

The most serious charges — complicity in a terrorist murder — have been recommended for two friends of the Chechen refugee who murdered teacher Samuel Paty after he showed pictures of the Prophet Mohammed to his pupils.

The national terror crime prosecutor’s office has also recommended charges against six other adults and six children for alleged offences linked to the killing in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

The murderer, 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, was shot dead by police at the scene.

Prosecutors believe his friends, named as Azim E. and Naim B. in the investigation, accompanied Anzorov to buy a knife and Naim. B travelled with him to the school.

Investigating magistrates will make the final call on whether to charge the suspects and send them to trial.

Paty was targeted after messages spread on social media that he had shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to his class.

The 47-year-old history and geography teacher had used the magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, which does not criminalise blasphemy.

Prosecutors have also recommended charges of associating with terrorists for the father of a student at Paty’s school, a radical Islamic preacher, as well as a Muslim convert in contact with Anzorov via Twitter.

Paty has become a symbol of France’s fight to maintain its strict secular values, with President Emmanuel Macron calling him a “quiet hero” of the republic.

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CRIME

Suspects in Paris Holocaust memorial defacement fled abroad: prosecutors

French police have tracked three suspects in last week's defacement of the Paris Holocaust memorial across the border into Belgium, prosecutors said.

Published: 22 May 2024 16:32 CEST
Suspects in Paris Holocaust memorial defacement fled abroad: prosecutors

The suspects were caught on security footage as they moved through Paris before “departing for Belgium from the Bercy bus station” in southeast Paris, prosecutors said.

Investigators added that the suspects’ “reservations had been made from Bulgaria”.

An investigation was launched after the memorial was vandalised with anti-Semitic image on the anniversary of the first major round-up of French Jews under the Nazis in 1941.

On May 14, red hands were found daubed on the Wall of the Righteous at the Paris Holocaust memorial, which lists 3,900 people honoured for saving Jews during the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.

Prosecutors are investigating damage to a protected historical building for national, ethnic, racial or religious motives.

Similar tags were found elsewhere in the Marais district of central Paris, historically a centre of French Jewish life.

The hands echoed imagery used earlier this month by students demonstrating for a ceasefire in Israel’s campaign against the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.

Their discovery prompted a new wave of outrage over anti-Semitism.

“The Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah (Holocaust) Memorial was vandalised overnight,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said in a statement, calling it an “unspeakable act”.

It was “despicable” to target the Holocaust Memorial, Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) wrote on X, formerly Twitter, calling the act a, “hateful rallying cry against Jews”.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the act as one of “odious anti-Semitism”.

The vandalism “damages the memory” both of those who saved Jews in the Holocaust and the victims, he wrote on X.

“The (French) Republic, as always, will remain steadfast in the face of odious anti-Semitism,” he added.

Around 10 other spots, including schools and nurseries, around the historic Marais district home to many Jews were similarly tagged, central Paris district mayor Ariel Weil told AFP.

France has the largest Jewish population of any country outside Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

The country has been on high alert for anti-Semitic acts since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel and the state’s campaign of reprisals in Gaza in the months since.

In February, a French source told AFP that Paris’s internal security service believed Russia’s FSB security service was behind an October graffiti campaign tagging stars of David on Paris buildings.

A Moldovan couple was arrested in the case.

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