French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading

Children stand in front of a draw of French history and geography teacher Samuel Paty, in Conflans Sainte Honorine, Saturday, Oct. 16, 2021.

A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 jihadist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.

His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.

Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.

Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.

Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.

His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologised to the teacher’s family.

The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.

The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.

Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.