A Paris court on Friday convicted eight people for their roles in the events that led to the killing of Samuel Paty, a history teacher whose stabbing and decapitation by an Islamist terrorist in 2020 deeply shocked France.
Mr. Paty was slain in October 2020 near his school northwest of Paris by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent who was angered by the teacher’s display of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate free speech in an eighth-grade civics class. The police shot and killed Mr. Anzorov shortly after the violent assault.
The verdict, decided by a panel of judges, was more severe than some had expected, in some cases going beyond what prosecutors had requested — a possible indication of the trauma that Mr. Paty’s killing inflicted on France.
It was an “irreparable attack on the Republic’s fundamental values,” Franck Zientara, the presiding judge, said of the teacher’s killing as he read the verdict, which was greeted by cheers by some in the courtroom and by cries of dismay from the families of the defendants.
Mr. Paty’s killing came after larger terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016 that together killed hundreds of people. Mr. Paty’s death also deeply unsettled the country and fed worries that France’s public-school teachers — who play a crucial role in imparting the French Republic’s values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism — were increasingly under threat from attacks by Islamist extremists.
Those fears were heightened last year, when another teacher was killed in eerily similar circumstances in northern France.
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