Three teens are charged over Samuel Paty’s murder

Three teenagers including a 17-year-old girl have been charged over the murder of French history teacher Samuel Paty, beheaded last month for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to his class.

Two 18-year-old men and the girl were charged with ‘criminal terrorist conspiracy’, a judicial source said. They were detained on Tuesday.

The men – one French and the other Chechen – are suspected of having been in contact with Mr Paty’s killer, 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, and have been placed in pre-trial detention.   

The girl was placed in a youth detention centre. She had been in contact with one of the two men.

Mr Paty, 47, was decapitated near his school in a Paris suburb by Anzorov, also a Chechen, on October 16.

Anzorov was furious about Mr Paty’s use of cartoons published by satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in a class on freedom of expression.

His murder sparked a torrent of outrage that prompted President Emmanuel Macron to crack down on Islamist extremism and violence in a country reeling from a wave of jihadist attacks since 2015 that have killed more than 250 people.

Anzorov was shot and killed by police.

Ten people have now been charged in the case, including a 14-year-old and 15-year-old accused of pointing Mr Paty out to his killer.

The three latest suspects were detained in separate regions of eastern France, a source said, hundreds of kilometres from the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine where Mr Paty was killed, and far from the Normandy city of Evreux where Anzorov lived.

Also charged in the case is a known Islamist radical who helped an outraged father of one of Mr Paty’s students stir up a campaign against him on social media. 

The father has also been charged, as have three others accused of helping Mr Paty carry out the killing.

Being charged in France does not necessarily mean a suspect will end up on trial, as a case can still be dropped for lack of evidence. 

Also Friday, prosecutors in the northern city of Cambrai said three teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17 were charged with ‘supporting terrorism’ for threats made during a national tribute to Mr Paty on Monday.

Similar incidents were reported in several French cities where youngsters suggested Mr Paty had got what he deserved for showing the cartoons, viewed as offensive by many Muslims.

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told RTL radio Friday that about 400 such incidents had been reported during a minute of silence observed for Mr Paty at schools countrywide, ‘some expressed mildly, others more forcefully’.

Legal action is likely in about a dozen more serious cases, Blanquer said.

Macron’s vociferous defence of French freedom of speech in response to Mr Paty’s murder has sparked furious protests in several Muslim-majority countries.

Charlie Hebdo republished the caricatures in September to mark the start of a trial for 14 suspects accused of complicity in the massacre of 12 people, including cartoonists, at the paper’s Paris offices by two jihadist gunmen in January 2015.

An Algerian man was convicted this week by a court in Pontoise northwest of Paris to six months in prison for ‘glorifying’ Mr Paty’s murder on social media and describing the killer as a ‘martyr’, judicial sources said Friday.

He was also banned from France for 10 years, which means he will be sent back to Algeria after serving his sentence.