Six teenagers went on trial in Paris on Monday for their role in the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty, the first of two trials in a case that horrified France.

The suspects arrived holding their coats over their faces at the closed-doors juvenile court, a judicial source told AFP.

The 47-year-old history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

His attacker, 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead at the scene by police.

The young radicalised Islamist murdered Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Paty had used the magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.

His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons. When the magazine first used the images in 2015, Islamic gunmen stormed its office, killing 12 people.

Last month another teacher, Dominique Bernard, was killed in Arras in northern France by a young radicalised Islamist.

Like Anzorov, Bernard’s suspected killer Mohammed Moguchkov also hailed from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus region.

Five of the adolescents on trial, who were 14 or 15 at the time of Paty’s murder, will be tried for criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence.

They are accused of having been on the lookout for Paty and identifying him to the killer in exchange for money.

A sixth teenager, who was 13 at the time, is accused of false allegations for wrongly saying that Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the classroom before he showed the cartoons.

A trial of eight adults also implicated in the case is scheduled for late 2024.

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