French teacher’s killer exchanged messages with student’s father who launched campaign against victim online – report

The man who beheaded French teacher Samuel Paty reportedly had contact with the father of one of his students, a man who publicly denounced Paty as a “thug” online in a protest campaign, according to police sources.

Abdullakh Anzorov, the 18-year-old Chechen refugee who gruesomely murdered Paty in his classroom in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine last week, had exchanged WhatsApp messages with the father of one of Paty’s pupils, who had urged fellow Muslims to file complaints against the teacher online, AFP reported on Tuesday, citing police sources. 

The news contradicted earlier reports claiming the killer had no contact with, or knowledge of, Paty or the school where he taught – despite allegedly having asked specifically for the 47-year-old history and geography teacher’s whereabouts upon arriving at the school on Friday. Anzorov posted a grisly image of the slain Paty to Twitter and took credit for the beheading before being himself gunned down in a shootout with police in the nearby town of Eragny.

In the days before his murder, Paty had received several threats stemming from a lesson in which he showed a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed to students as part of a class discussion on freedom of expression. While the teacher reportedly suggested Muslim pupils leave the classroom before he showed the image, two – including a 13-year-old girl – refused to do so and reported the content of the lesson (in which a caricature of a “naked man” was said to be the “Muslim prophet”) to their parents, who were predictably outraged.

The girl’s father denounced Paty as a “thug” in a series of social media videos he posted in the days following the lesson, urging his fellow Muslims to file complaints against the teacher in messages that were widely shared, including by a local mosque that urged its own flock to contact the offended father. While the original videos did not contain Paty’s name, they included enough identifying information that the teacher was soon doxxed.

The father and several of his relatives have since been arrested in a crackdown on “Islamic terrorism” following Paty’s killing, as the French government acknowledged it had not done enough to police extremist organizations. Five students have also reportedly been arrested for allegedly helping Anzorov identify Paty in exchange for money.

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