PARIS  -  Eight people went on trial in France on Monday charged with contributing to the climate of hatred that led to an 18-year-old Islamist radical of Chechen origin beheading teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris in 2020. Seven men and one woman are appearing in court in the trial, set to last until December, over the murder of 47-year-old Paty, a teacher of history and geography, that shocked France.

They trial began with the defendants confirming their identity, an AFP correspondent said.  Perpetrator Abdoullakh Anzorov, who had requested asylum in France, was himself killed by police shortly after he murdered Paty near the latter’s school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine west of Paris. The teacher, who had shown his class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, is regarded as a hero of free speech by the French authorities and his school is now being named after him. Six defendants, three of whom are under judicial supervision and are not currently in prison, are being tried for participation in a criminal terrorist act, a crime punishable by 30 years in jail.

They include Brahim Chnina, a 52-year-old Moroccan. He is the father of a 13-year-old schoolgirl who claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. The claim was false and she was not in the classroom at the time. Also on trial is Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old Franco-Moroccan Islamist activist. He and Chnina spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecution, of “designating a target”, “provoking a feeling of hatred” and “thus preparing several crimes”. Both men have been in pre-trial detention for the past four years. Two young friends of the attacker are facing even graver charges of “complicity in terrorist murder”, a crime punishable by life imprisonment. Naim Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, a Russian of Chechen origin, are accused of having accompanied Anzorov to a knife shop in the northern city of Rouen the day before the attack. “Nearly three years of investigation have never managed to establish that Naim Boudaoud had any knowledge of the attacker’s criminal plans,” his lawyers Adel Fares and Hiba Rizkallah told AFP, denying their client’s “complicity” in the crime.