Samuel Paty’s family has filed a complaint against the French administration, accusing it of not having protected the professor, killed in October 2020.
The family of Samuel Paty, assassinated in October 2020, filed a complaint on Wednesday with the Paris prosecutor’s office against the administration, considered to be at fault for not having protected the professor, their adviser, Virginie Le Roy, announced to AFP.
“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,” said Me Le Roy, confirming information from Liberation.
The complaint, of which AFP has knowledge, targets the offenses of “failure to prevent a crime and non-assistance to a person in danger” and targets “several agents of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of National Education “who had to know directly or indirectly about the situation of Samuel Paty.
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In detail, the complaint recalls the slow process started with a course on secularism in a college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) at the beginning of October 2020, which resulted in the assassination on the 16th of the 47-year-old professor, stabbed then beheaded by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin, killed shortly afterwards 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 had claimed his gesture, congratulating himself on having “avenge the prophet”.
“The agents of the Ministry of the Interior failed to assist Samuel Paty”
For the family, “from October 8 and until October 16, Samuel Paty, the principal and the teachers identified a serious threat to their physical integrity and the security of the college”, resulting in particular from the media coverage of the case via the social networks by Brahim Chnina, father of a schoolgirl who claimed to have attended the course, and by the sulphurous Islamist militant Abdelhakim Sefrioui.
But for the family, “the agents of the Ministry of the Interior failed to assist Samuel Paty”, who “should have benefited from at least the weakest protection”, one or two agents, in view of the ” threat” aimed at him, which “would have saved him”.
The complaint also targets several agents of National Education, for example at the rectorate or at the college.
A report from the General Inspectorate of Education in December 2020, looking at the events that took place in Samuel Paty’s college before his assassination, considered that the institution had shown responsiveness in its care but underlined a lack of monitoring of social networks.
“Prior to this complaint, the family of Samuel Paty questioned the ministries concerned and asked them for the transmission of several information and documents, they did not obtain any response”, specifies the complaint.
“No comment at this stage,” reacted to AFP the Ministry of the Interior.
In the anti-terrorism investigation into the assassination, at least fifteen people are indicted in this case, including six college students, the father of the teenager and Mr. Sefrioui. The investigations could be closed by the end of 2022, according to a source familiar with the matter.