Abdoullakh Anzorov

Samuel Paty was born on 18 September 1973 in Moulins, Allier.

He attended Théodore de Banville High School, Lumière University Lyon 2 and the IUFM, Lyon.

Paty was a middle-school teacher of history, geography, and civics who taught for five years at the Collège Bois-d'Aulne, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France, a suburb 30 km north-west of central Paris.

He lived ten minutes away from the middle school, in the small town of Éragny, Val-d'Oise.

He was married and had a five-year-old son.

The perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, was an 18-year-old Russian immigrant of Chechen ethnic descent, born in Moscow, Russia.

Chechnya is a Muslim-majority republic and federal subject of the Russian Federation.

Anzorov moved to France with refugee status 12 years earlier as a six-year-old boy.

He lived in the La Madeleine district of the Normandy town of Évreux, about 100 km (62 miles) from the murder scene and had no apparent connection with the teacher or the school.

The Anzorov family moved from the village of Shalazhi in Chechnya.

Abdoullakh's father Abuezid moved first to Moscow, and then to Paris.

One of Paty's students had alleged that in a class on freedom of expression, he had shown his students Charlie Hebdo 's 2012 cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad, despite the fact that she was absent from the class that day.

She alleged that one of the cartoons portrayed an image of Muhammad naked with his genitals exposed.

Since then, ten people have been charged with conspiring with and assisting the killer, including an imam, a parent of a student, and two students at Paty's school.

French president Emmanuel Macron said that the incident was "a typical Islamist terrorist attack", and that "our compatriot was killed for teaching children freedom of speech".

Anzorov's half-sister joined ISIS in Syria in 2014.

On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty, a French secondary school teacher, was killed and beheaded in Éragny-sur-Oise, a suburb of Paris, France, by an Islamist terrorist.

The perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee, killed and beheaded Paty with a cleaver, and was shot and killed by police minutes later.

A social media campaign against Paty was linked to his subsequent murder.

The murder was one of several attacks in France in recent years and the second terrorist attack in France during the 2020 trial, at which alleged accomplices to the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks were to be arraigned for terrorism targeting the cartoons' publishers.

The Paty incident sparked debate in French society and politics.

Many Muslims expressed offence at the cartoons, which were also the subject of the previous Charlie Hebdo shooting.

The president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith condemned the murder, as did imams of several mosques.

Several Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, Iran, Jordan and Kuwait and leaders as well as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation denounced the attack and condemned the publication of the cartoons.

The response of the French government to the murder was criticized by many Muslims, including Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, some of whom called for a boycott of French goods.

In November 2023, six teens went to trial on charges related to the murder.

They were found guilty in December 2023 and given brief or suspended prison sentences.

In March 2020, the family had received refugee status and 10-year residency cards in France.

Abdoullakh was not noticed by security agencies, though he had previously been in court on minor misdemeanour charges.

Before the attack, he was in communication with two unidentified jihadists in Syria, including one Russian speaker.

The jihadists were located through their IP addresses at Idlib, Syria, the last rebel stronghold of the country which was under the control of the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham organization.

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham later denied responsibility for the attack.

Immediately following the attack, Anzorov claimed responsibility in an audio message in Russian, in which he announced his readiness to be a "shahid" (martyr) and that he would "avenge the prophet" by killing Paty, who had "shown Allah in an insulting manner".

In a video broadcast on Instagram, he referred to the Islamic State, among other Islamic terrorist organizations.

Anzorov's family said they did not understand his actions.

Anzorov had displayed signs of radicalization: on 30 August, he had posted a photomontage depicting a beheading on his Twitter account.

His Twitter account had been reported to the platform PHAROS without being tagged for further scrutiny.

On 13 September 2020, he made a Twitter thread denouncing "the infidelity of the Saudi state, of its leaders, as well as all those who support them", a belief which he based on "its participation in the founding of idols worshiped [sic] outside of Allah", referring to the UN, UNESCO, WTO, Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League.

While he was already showing signs of radicalization, Anzorov had made two requests for training in security operations through the National Council for Private Security Activities, the national licensing body, which were both rejected "because of his involvement in acts of violence".

Investigators are uncertain as to whether his requests were made to enable him to access sensitive sites.