The accused face a sentence for actions leading to beheading

Eight people accused of complicity in the jihadist killing of French teacher Samuel Paty will learn their fate after a six-week trial in a Paris court.

They include the father of a student whose lie about Patty's alleged discrimination against Muslims in the classroom set in motion the chain of events that led to his beheading in the street in October 2020.

Also facing charges are a Muslim activist who ran an online campaign against Patty, two childhood friends of Chechen-born killer Abdullah Anzorov who allegedly helped him obtain weapons, and four radicalized men with whom he traded messages on social media.

Anzorov was shot dead by police minutes after he killed the 47-year-old history and geography teacher outside his high school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorin.

He was fired up by claims circulating online that a few days earlier, Patty had ordered Muslims to leave his class of 13-year-olds before revealing obscene pictures of the Prophet Muhammad.

In fact, Patty was teaching a lesson on freedom of speech and before showing one of the controversial images first published by Charlie Hebdo magazine, he advised students to avert their eyes if they were afraid of being offended.

The student named Z. Chnina wasn't even in class when it happened, but she told her father that she was punished for objecting.

The trial centered on legal arguments over whether people who had no prior knowledge of the attack – or in some cases even of its perpetrator – could still be guilty of what he said was “terrorist association”.

Summarizing in court this week, prosecution lawyers sought jail terms of between 18 months' probation and 16 years for the defendants, saying their actions indirectly led to the atrocity.

But prosecutors also angered members of Patty's family by refusing to seek maximum sentences and by downgrading some of the crimes charged.

During the trial, the court heard the first public testimony of the girl Z. Chnina, now 17 years old.

A year ago, she received a short suspended sentence for defamation from a juvenile court held behind closed doors.

“I want to apologize to the whole (Patti family) because if it wasn't for my lies, they wouldn't be here today,” she said, sobbing.

“And I want to apologize to my dad because when he made the video, it was partly because of my lie.

In the days after Patti's free speech class, her father Brahim Hnina made videos denouncing the teacher by name. He also enlisted the help of activist Abdelhakim Sefriwi to spread the campaign through his social media network.

Chnina and Sefrioui never called for action against Paty and were unaware of Anzorov's existence until after the murder.

But for the prosecution, they were still guilty of “terrorist association” because they were aware of the possible consequences of their campaign.

“No one is saying they wanted Samuel Patty dead, but in lighting 1,000 digital fuses, they knew one of them would lead to jihadist violence against the teacher,” according to the prosecutor's statement.

The Context in October 2020 was under heightened tension over jihadist violence after Charlie Hebdo republished some of its controversial cartoons of Muhammad. Five years earlier, most of the magazine's staff had been killed in a jihadist gun attack on their Paris office.

In court this week, the longest sentences were sought for Anzorov's two friends who accompanied him when he bought a knife and a fake gun. One of them drove Anzorov to the school on the afternoon of the attack.

None of the defendants are radicalized Muslims, and the court did not establish that they knew about Anzorov's plans.

Therefore, the prosecution reduced the charge against them to “complicity in a terrorist attack”, which carries a life sentence.

The other four defendants were people Anzorov had talked to on chat lines, again without him ever revealing his intention to kill Patty.

One of them, a convert to Islam named Priscilla Mangel, admitted to making “provocative” remarks online about the Patty case, but said she would never have made them if she had known Anzorov's intentions.

“For me it was a seamless discussion with an anonymous person.”

For the lawyers, none of the defendants would have faced criminal proceedings for what they said had it not been for Patty's murder.

So the key legal question facing the court is whether speech can become illegal depending on what follows.