The anti-terrorism investigating judges in charge of the investigation into the assassination of Samuel Paty in October 2020 in the Yvelines closed their investigations on Thursday, AFP learned from a judicial source, confirming a source familiar with the matter.
Fourteen people are indicted in this case, according to the judicial source, including several college students.
A fifteenth person, a minor teenager, had also been indicted but her file was severed, according to the judicial source.
Read alsoAssassination of Samuel Paty: new charges against "Sweet Scar", push-to-crime of the terrorist
On October 16, 2020, the 47-year-old history and geography professor was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin, killed shortly after by the police.
The 18-year-old man, radicalized, accused him of having shown caricatures of Muhammad in class.
In an audio message in Russian, he claimed responsibility for his action, congratulating himself on having “avenge the prophet”.
He had learned of the controversy targeting the professor a few days earlier via social networks, where videos of Brahim Chnina, the father of a schoolgirl targeted by an exclusion for indiscipline and who claimed to have attended the course, had been broadcast, and of Islamist militant Abdelhakim Sefrioui.
A complaint filed by the family against the State
The Pantin mosque, implicated for having relayed the video of Brahim Chnina on his Facebook page, had been closed for nearly six months by the authorities, before reopening after the departure of the former rector M'hammed Henniche.
The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) must now submit its final indictment in the coming months, that is to say who it wishes to see tried or not, before which jurisdiction and for which counts.
The investigating judges will then be able to follow or not his requisitions.
Another investigation was opened in April by the Paris prosecutor's office for failure to assist a person in danger and failure to prevent a crime, after a complaint from relatives of Samuel Paty.
Their lawyer had estimated that "mistakes were committed both on the side of National Education and on the side of the Ministry of the Interior, without which Samuel Paty could have been saved".
One of the challenges of this investigation is to establish whether these agents could have been aware of the existence of a real, targeted and immediate threat against the professor.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said he "understood" the complaint of those close to the teacher, but felt that "the state will not have to be ashamed" of its action in this case.
