The trial of eight adults, seven men and one woman, accused of contributing to the hate campaign that led to the October 16, 2020 murder of Samuel Patti, 47, a history and geography professor, began today before a special criminal court in Paris.
The killer, Abdullah Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen-born Russian Islamist who had asylum-seeker status in France, is the big absentee in the trial: he was killed by police shortly after he stabbed and beheaded the professor in Conflang-Cent-Honorin, in the Paris region.
The hearing began with the verification of the identity of the defendants.
Two young friends of the perpetrator will answer for “complicity in a terrorist murder”, a crime punishable by life imprisonment. The six other defendants, three of whom are under court supervision, are not in custody and are being tried for participating in a terrorist criminal association of thugs, a crime punishable by 30 years in prison.
The defendants include Brahim Snina, a 52-year-old Moroccan man, the father of the 13-year-old schoolgirl who had falsely stated – she was absent from class – that Samuel Patti had asked Muslim students to leave the classroom before showing caricatures of Mohammed, and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old French-Moroccan Islamist militant.
These two, who have been in temporary custody for four years, massively reproduced the teenager’s lies on social media seeking, according to the indictment, to “set a target”, “incite feelings of hatred” and “thereby prepare crimes”.
Both are charged with participating in a terrorist association of thugs.
“They want to make Abdelhakim Sefrioui pay for all of his militant work” even though he “did not know the perpetrator” of the attack and “did not participate in it,” argued one of his lawyers, Vincent Brengar, before the hearing.
Brahim Snina’s daughter and five other former students were sentenced last fall to sentences ranging from 14 months in jail with probation to two years in prison, six months of which were without parole, at the end of a closed-door trial in juvenile court.
Anzorov’s two friends, Naim Budaud, 22, and Chechen-born Russian Azim Epsirhanov, 23, who are facing life sentences for complicity in a terrorist attack, are mainly accused of having accompanied Anzorov the day before the attack to a knife factory in Rouen, about 130 kilometers (130 miles) west of Paris.
The killing of Samuel Patti – which occurred while the trial for the January 7, 2015 attacks on the editorial staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was underway – shocked French society
“The tragic mechanics that resulted in the martyrdom of Samuel Patti reveal the depth of Islamist intolerance in France and its permeability to terrorism. Its detailed exposure at a public hearing must not only result in the severe condemnation of those who abetted it, but also allow our society to become aware of a deadly danger,” said Thibault de Montbrial and Pauline Ragot, lawyers for Mikael Patti, one of the murdered professor’s sisters.
Francis Spiner, a lawyer for other members of Samuel Patti’s family, expressed the wish that “justice would be lifted to the level of the crime committed, an unthinkable event in the history of the Republic.”
The trial is scheduled to last until December 20.
