Four people tried on appeal at the beginning of 2026 – Liberation
The appeal trial of four people suspected of being involved, in varying degrees, in the assassination of Professor Samuel Paty, beheaded by a Chechen Islamist in October 2020, will take place from January 26 to February 27, 2026, AFP learned this Wednesday, April 2 from a source close to the file on Wednesday. At the end of the trial at first instance last December and after seven weeks of debate, the eight accused had been all guilty and condemned to sentences of one to sixteen years in prison. Four of them appealed and will be rejected by the Paris Special Assize Court.
This new trial concerns the two friends of Professor Samuel Paty, Naïm Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, recognized guilty of assassination and sentenced to 16 years in criminal imprisonment. The other two convicted of having appealed are Brahim Chnina and the Islamist preacher Abdelhakim Sefrioui. They had respectively received thirteen and fifteen years of criminal imprisonment after being found guilty of association of terrorist criminals (AMT), for having launched a « Haine campaign » having made Samuel Paty a « target ».
« It is an extraordinarily expected trial, given the intensity of the debates that arise and the extremely criticizable nature of the decision of the Assize Court at first instance »reacted to AFP, Me Vincent Brengarth, one of the lawyers of Abdelhakim Sefrioui. In their motivations, a 40 -page document, the judges of the Paris Special Assize Court admitted that Brahim Chnina, the father of the college student who lied by accusing the professor of having discriminated against the Muslim students of his class during a course on freedom of expression where he presented a caricature of Muhammad, and the Islamist preacher Abdelhakim Sefrioui did not know the assassin From Samuel Paty, Abdoullakh Anzorov.
Nevertheless, the judges stressed that « The two accused, knowingly, took the risk, despite the danger and the threats aimed at Samuel Paty, that a voluntary attack on his physical integrity is carried by a third party, violent and radicalized which became their armed wing ». According to the magistrates, the two men « Have helped create a state of mind capable of arouing crime »,, « By attributing anger and hatred of a radicalized spirit ».
But that he justified to condemn them for association of terrorist criminals, a crime liable to thirty years of criminal imprisonment, had questioned after the verdict Vincent Brengarth. The latter believed that what was accused of his client was an unintentional offense as « The deliberate endangerment of others » and not of an association of terrorist criminals. He then considered that the court’s decision « Could establish disturbing jurisprudence ».
