LONDON: A Muslim teenager in France has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison over her association with and support for the killer of schoolteacher Samuel Paty.
Paty was stabbed to death in a Paris suburb after showing students images of the Prophet Muhammad.
The teenager, who was aged 17 at the time of the killing, repeated the demands of Paty’s killer, 18-year-old Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, who was shot dead by police after the attack. A further six people are awaiting trial in connection to the 2020 murder.
Authorities discovered Daesh content on the girl’s phone and information about weaponry. She was sentenced for “terrorist criminal association,” with authorities noting signs of continued radicalization after she signaled her desire to travel to Turkey or Chechnya. However, police said while in custody, the girl had privately condemned the killing of Paty.
France has faced a series of controversies over schoolteachers receiving physical and even death threats from students.
Didier Lemaire, a teacher, was placed under police protection after receiving death threats in the wake of comments he made in support of Paty.
And in the months after the murder, a separate incident saw a school student arrested for threatening to behead his teacher “like Samuel Paty.”
French teen handed jail term over links to Samuel Paty killing
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French teen handed jail term over links to Samuel Paty killing
- Schoolteacher was stabbed to death in Paris in 2020 after showing students images of Prophet Muhammad
- Aged 17 at the time, the girl showed support for 18-year-old killer, had Daesh content on her phone
Archbishop of York says he was ‘intimidated’ by Israeli militias during West Bank visit
- “We were … intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” the archbishop said
LONDON: The Archbishop of York has revealed that he felt “intimidated” by Israeli militias during a visit to the Holy Land this year.
“We were stopped at various checkpoints and intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” the Rev. Stephen Cottrell told his Christmas Day congregation at York Minster.
The archbishop added: “We have become — and really, I can think of no other way of putting it — we have become fearful of each other, and especially fearful of strangers, or just people who aren’t quite like us.
“We don’t seem to be able to see ourselves in them, and therefore we spurn our common humanity.”
He recounted how YMCA charity representatives in Bethlehem, who work with persecuted Palestinian communities in the West Bank, gave him an olive wood Nativity scene carving.
The carving depicted a “large gray wall” blocking the three kings from getting to the stable to see Mary, Joseph and Jesus, he said.
He said it was sobering for him to see the wall in real life during his visit.
He continued: “But this Christmas morning here in York, as well as thinking about the walls that divide and separate the Holy Land, I’m also thinking of all the walls and barriers we erect across the whole of the world and, perhaps most alarming, the ones we build around ourselves, the ones we construct in our hearts and minds, and of how our fearful shielding of ourselves from strangers — the strangers we encounter in the homeless on our streets, refugees seeking asylum, young people starved of opportunity and growing up without hope for the future — means that we are in danger of failing to welcome Christ when he comes.”
