On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty (French: [samɥɛl pati]), a French secondary school teacher, was attacked and killed in Éragny, Val-d'Oise, Île-de-France, France, by an Islamist terrorist.
The perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian Muslim refugee, killed and beheaded Paty with a cleaver, and was shot and killed by police minutes later. A social media campaign against Paty was linked to his subsequent murder. One of Paty's students had alleged that in a class on freedom of expression, he had shown his students Charlie Hebdo's 2012 cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad, including an image of Muhammad naked with his genitals exposed. She later admitted that she lied about the material shown and had been absent from the class. Since then, ten people have been charged with conspiring with and assisting the killer, including an Imam, a parent of a student, and two students at Paty's school.
French president Emmanuel Macron said that the incident was "a typical Islamist terrorist attack", and that "our compatriot was killed for teaching children freedom of speech". The murder was one of several attacks in France in recent years and the second terrorist attack in France during the 2020 trial, at which alleged accomplices to the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks were to be arraigned for terrorism targeting the cartoons' publishers. In 2015 and 2016, two Islamist terror attacks (in Paris and in Nice) killed over 200 people. The Paty incident sparked debate in French society and politics. Many Muslims expressed offence at the cartoons, which were also the subject of the previous Charlie Hebdo shooting. The president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith condemned the murder, as did Imams of several mosques. Several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, as well as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, both denounced the attack and condemned the publication of the cartoons.
The response of the French government to the murder was criticized by many Muslims, including the president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the Republic of Turkey, some of whom called for a boycott of French goods. In November 2023, six teens went to trial on charges related to the murder. They were found guilty in December 2023 and given brief or suspended prison sentences.
Background
Victim
Samuel Paty (French: [samɥɛl pati]) was born on 18 September 1973 in Moulins, Allier. He attended Théodore de Banville High School, Lumière University Lyon 2 and the IUFM, Lyon. Paty was a middle-school teacher of history, geography, and civics who taught for five years at the Collège Bois-d'Aulne, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France, a suburb 30 kilometres (19 mi) north-west of central Paris. He lived ten minutes away from the middle school, in the small town of Éragny, Val-d'Oise. He was married and had a five-year-old son.
Perpetrator
The perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, was an 18-year-old who was born in Moscow and grew up in France. In their media statements French police drew attention to the teen's Chechen ethnicity, one of several Muslim minority groups in France. Anzorov moved to France with refugee status 12 years earlier as a six-year-old boy. He lived in the La Madeleine district of the Normandy town of Évreux, about 100 km (62 miles) from the murder scene and had no apparent connection with the teacher or the school.
The Anzorov family moved from the village of Shalazhi in Chechnya. Abdoullakh's father Abuezid moved first to Moscow, and then to Paris. Anzorov's half-sister joined ISIS in Syria in 2014. In March 2020, the family had received refugee status and 10-year residency cards in France. Abdoullakh was not noticed by security agencies, though he had previously been in court on minor misdemeanour charges.
Before the attack, he was in communication with an unidentified Russian-speaking jihadist in Syria. According to investigators, this individual was located via IP address to Idlib, Syria, the last rebel stronghold of the country which was under the control of the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham organization. Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham later denied responsibility for the attack. Immediately following the attack, Anzorov claimed responsibility in an audio message in Russian, in which he announced his readiness to be a martyr, and that he would "avenge the prophet" by killing Paty, who had "shown Allah in an insulting manner". In a video broadcast on Instagram, he referred to the Islamic State, among other Islamic terrorist organizations.
Anzorov's family said they did not understand his actions. Anzorov had displayed signs of radicalisation: on 30 August, he had posted a photo montage depicting a beheading on his Twitter account. His Twitter account had been reported to the platform PHAROS without being tagged for further scrutiny. On 13 September 2020, he made a Twitter thread denouncing "the infidelity of the Saudi state, of its leaders, as well as all those who support them", a belief which he based on "its participation in the founding of idols worshiped [sic] outside of Allah", referring to the UN, UNESCO, WTO, Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League. While he was already showing signs of radicalization, Anzorov had made two requests for training in security operations through the National Council for Private Security Activities, the national licensing body, which were both rejected "because of his involvement in acts of violence". Investigators are uncertain as to whether his requests were made to enable him to access sensitive sites.
Anzorov's body was repatriated from France in December 2020; he was buried in his hometown in the Urus-Martanovsky District in Chechnya. The funeral was attended by about 200 people, some of whom shouted "Allahu Akbar".
Events leading up to the murder
Paty taught a moral and civic education course in early October 2020 on freedom of expression, in accord with the French national curriculum. He was alleged to have shown some of his teenage students a caricature of Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during a class discussion about freedom of speech. Before allegedly showing the caricature, Paty had invited Muslim students to leave the classroom if they wished. According to one student, he had previously shown these cartoons as part of the discussion every year since the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015. In the largest Sunni sects of Islam, any depiction of Muhammad is considered blasphemous.
According to France’s antiterrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard, Paty's lesson plan included two depictions of Muhammad, including one where he is naked with his genitals exposed.
Brahim Chnina, a female student's father, accused Paty of disseminating pornography to students and filed a criminal complaint with the police. Paty responded by filing a complaint of defamation. Chnina claimed on YouTube and Facebook that Paty had displayed an image of Muhammad nude; he named Paty, and gave the school's address. He encouraged other parents to join him in action and mobilise against the teacher, whom he described as a thug.
The Grande Mosque de Pantin published a video on its Facebook page a week before the murder. Abdelhakim Sefrioui, the imam of the mosque, a member of the Conseil des imams de France, and an Islamist militant known to French anti-terrorism police, accompanied the parent in his protest against the teacher in front of the school for showing the caricatures and demanding to meet the school's principal. Sefrioui called the teacher a "thug" in a video (French: voyou), while denouncing the administration of the college. He demanded the teacher's exclusion from high school with the rectorate. The term "thug" had been repeatedly used by Chnina earlier. The videos were taken down in the hours after the murder.
Chnina also filed a complaint with the school, and encouraged people to protest at the school. A meeting was held between the head teacher, the teacher, and an official from the education authority. Chnina additionally filed a legal complaint about Paty's lesson, leading the teacher to go to the local police station accompanied by the principal. Paty told investigators he could not understand the complaint because Chnina's daughter was not in class on the day Paty showed the cartoon.
In March 2021, Chnina's daughter, known as "Z", admitted she had been suspended from school due to truancy since the day prior to Paty showing the cartoons, and, as such, she had not been in the classroom that day. Instead, she made up the cartoon story to appease her father. According to the Paty family lawyers, however, Brahim Chnina was aware that his daughter had been suspended before the cartoon incident.
The investigation showed that Chnina spoke to Anzorov nine times by telephone in a four-day period after he published videos criticizing Paty.
Murder
On 16 October 2020, a week and a half after Paty's freedom-of-speech class, Anzorov was driven to Paty's school by an alleged accomplice and waited outside the gates of the school. He asked a number of students to point out the teacher. He paid two students, aged 14 and 15, around €300 to identify Paty; the two then waited with Anzorov for two hours until they sighted Paty leaving. A Friday, it was the last schoolday before a two-week holiday. Anzorov had told them he intended to "hit" and "humiliate" Paty, according to Jean-François Ricard, in order to "make him apologise for the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad".
Anzorov then followed Paty as he left the school. Using a knife 30 centimetres (12 in) long, Anzorov killed Paty and beheaded him in the Rue du Buisson Moineau in Éragny-sur-Oise near the school where Paty taught, at approximately 5:00 p.m. In addition to decapitating Paty, Anzorov inflicted a number of wounds to his head, abdomen, and upper limbs. Witnesses told police they heard the killer shout "Allahu Akbar" (the Takbir) during the attack.
Minutes after the murder, an account named @Tchetchene_270 (French: Chechen 270), identified by prosecutor Jean-François Ricard as belonging to Abdoullakh Anzorov, posted on Twitter an image of Paty's severed head. The photo was accompanied by the message: "In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful, ... to Macron, leader of the infidels, I executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad, calm his fellow human beings before a harsh punishment is inflicted on you." The image was seen by many of Paty's students.
Minutes later, Anzorov was confronted by police about 600 metres (660 yd) from the scene in Éragny, near Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, and the police tried to arrest him. Anzorov shot at the police with an air rifle and tried to stab them with a knife. In response, the police shot him nine times, killing him. On Anzorov's phone, they found a text claiming responsibility and a photograph of Paty's body.
French government response
President Macron visited the school where Paty had worked, and said that the incident was "a typical Islamist terrorist attack". He also said: "our compatriot was killed for teaching children freedom of speech". French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer called the killing an "attack on the French nation as a whole". Jean-Rémi Girard, president of the secondary school teaching union, said teachers were "devastated" but would not be cowed. France's anti-terrorist prosecutor said the teacher had been "assassinated for teaching," and the attack was an assault on the principle of freedom of expression.
Sixteen people were later taken into custody for investigation. They included Anzorov's grandparents, parents, and 17-year-old brother. Also arrested were Sefrioui, Chnina, who was suspected of issuing a fatwa against Paty, and four students who were suspected of taking money from the killer in exchange for identifying the teacher.
French police announced that there were more than 80 messages on social media from French people supporting the attacker. The French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, ordered that the Grande Mosque de Pantin was to be closed for six months. The mosque, which has about 1,500 worshippers situated just north of Paris, was ordered closed for having published videos inciting violence against Samuel Paty. The mosque removed the posts after the murder and expressed "regret" over publishing the videos and published instead an announcement condemning the "savagery" of the teacher's killing.
Two days after the murder, a defence council ordered the deportation of 231 foreign citizens who were known to security services in the Fiche S register. Of those, 180 were in prison and the rest were to be arrested. The interior minister Gérald Darmanin demanded dissolution of two Islamic NGOs: Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) and Barakacity, which he described as "enemies" of the state. Both NGOs were accused by Darmanin of taking part in a social media campaign against the teacher, launched by the father of one of his pupils. The CCIF denied participating in such a harassment campaign and stated it was taking legal action against the minister. Despite criticism by Amnesty international, European Network Against Racism, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights League (France), the Council of Ministers of France dissolved the CCIF at the beginning of December. According to some sources, public inquiry into the killing did not sustain the theory that the CCIF was implicated in Paty's death in any way.
On 21 October a national memorial for Paty, prepared in consultation with his family, was held at the Sorbonne. President Macron awarded the Légion d'honneur posthumously to Paty. Texts read at the ceremony included Jean Jaurès's Lettre aux instituteurs et institutrices (lit. 'letter to the teachers'). In an address of around 15 minutes, Macron described Paty as "a quiet hero" and stated that "we will not give up cartoons". Macron also announced that the "Sheikh Yassin Collective" founded by Sefrioui to support Hamas would be dissolved, as having been "directly implicated" in the murder. The government was reported to be preparing to dissolve a further fifty organizations connected with radical Islam.