A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the prison sentences of three men convicted of the 2020 jihadist beheading of a teacher who showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to a class.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by a young 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.
A Paris appeals court reduced the sentences of two of Anzorov’s friends, French citizen Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, to six and seven years in prison, respectively.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helped him obtain weapons before the beheading.
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Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the cartoons, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then 13, was not in the classroom at the time and during the first trial he apologized to the teacher’s family.
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However, the court left intact the 15-year term of French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui.
The quartet were among seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hate that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become an icon of free speech, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
