Paris (AFP) - A French court on Friday handed heavy sentences to several men convicted of having played a role in the jihadist beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020 – a murder that horrified France.

Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old Islamist radical of Chechen origin after showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class.

His killer, Abdoullakh Anzorov, died in a shootout with police.

Two friends of Anzorov, Naim Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, were on Friday convicted of complicity in the killing and jailed for 16 years.

Prosecutors had accused them of having given Anzorov logistical support, including to buy weapons.

Epsirkhanov admitted he had received 800 euros ($840) from his fellow Chechen Anzorov to find him a real gun but had not succeeded.

Prosecutors said Boudaoud had accompanied Anzorov to buy two replica guns and steel pellets on the day of the attack.

- Lies spread online -

Two other defendants who took part in the hate campaign against Paty before his murder were convicted of terrorist criminal association.

Brahim Chnina, the 52-year-old Moroccan father of a schoolgirl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, was jailed for 13 years.

His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and earlier in the trial apologised to her former teacher’s family.

Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old Franco-Moroccan Islamist activist, was jailed for 15 years.

Chnina had posted messages and videos attacking Paty online. Sefrioui, founder of a now-banned pro-Hamas group, had denounced Paty as a “thug” in another video.

He and Chnina spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, said prosecutors, to provoke “a feeling of hatred” to prepare the way for “several crimes”.

Chnina spoke to Anzorov nine times by telephone in a four-day period after he published videos criticising Paty, the investigation showed. But Sefrioui had told investigators he was only seeking “administrative sanctions”.

“Nobody is saying that they wanted Samuel Paty to die,” prosecutor Nicholas Braconnay had told the court.

“But by lighting thousands of fuses online, they knew that one of them would lead to jihadist violence against the blasphemous teacher.”

The other four defendants, part of a network of jihadist sympathisers around Anzorov spreading inflammatory content online, were also convicted, receiving either jail or suspended sentences.

- Paty ‘died for nothing’ -

Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, had used the cartoons, first published in Charlie Hebdo magazine, as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.

Blasphemy is legal in a nation that prides itself on its secular values, and there is a long history of cartoons mocking religious figures.

In November, seven men and one woman went on trial, charged with contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.

The case was heard by a court panel of professional judges in a trial that lasted seven weeks.

Before the court’s ruling came on Friday, the family of Paty had accused the prosecution of leniency.

Prosecutors had requested that some of the accused be acquitted, and had disputed the “terrorist intent” of the defendants.

Paty’s sister Mickaelle told BFMTV that the demands by prosecutors were “very weak”, saying she feared that these would be confirmed by the court.

“I think my brother died for nothing,” she said, and teachers were still being targeted by violence and threats, she added.

Paty’s killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons, which originally appeared in 2015.

After the magazine first published them, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.