Teacher's Killer Paid Over $350 for Inside Help: Prosecutor

Abdullakh Anzorov allegedly got help from 2 teenage students
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 21, 2020 4:04 PM CDT
Teacher's Killer Paid Over $350 for Inside Help: Prosecutor
French President Emmanuel Macron leaves after paying his respects by the coffin of slain teacher Samuel Paty in the courtyard of the Sorbonne university during a national memorial event, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020 in Paris.   (AP Photo/Francois Mori, Pool)

The guy who beheaded a teacher in France may have paid two students more than $350 to help him out, the BBC reports. Prosecutors say Abdullakh Anzorov, 18—who was later shot dead by police—paid two students, age 14 and 15, to identify Samuel Paty when he left his school on Friday. Anzorov told them he planned to "film the teacher [and] make him apologize for the cartoon of the Prophet [Muhammad]," said anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard, adding that the killer said he wanted "to humiliate him, to hit him." Ricard said the students hung out with Anzorov for over two hours waiting for the teacher to appear. The prosecutor added that authorities have linked the killing to an online hate campaign against the 47-year-old victim.

The father of one of Paty's students is accused of launching the campaign and texting with the killer before the attack. But Ricard said the videos were "innacurate" because the man's daughter wasn't in Paty's two classes earlier this month, when he showed the cartoons during a lesson on free speech. Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that French President Emmanuel Macron bestowed the Légion d’honneur posthumously on Paty in a private ceremony Wednesday at Sorbonne university. Macron called him "a quiet hero" and said "he was the victim of stupidity, of lies, of confusion, of a hatred of what, in our deepest essence, we are. ... On Friday, he became the face of the Republic." (See what French police have been doing in the case.)

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