French teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by a radical Islamic terrorist for showing images of the Islamic prophet during a less on freedom of expression, is being honoured by the French state – but just days prior to his brutal assassination he was interrogated by the police over those same images.
France has, at the governmental and institutional level, come out strongly for Mr Paty, a father-of-one in his forties, as a martyr to France’s traditional values of liberty and secularism — so the fact he was hauled before investigators for the act of “blasphemy” which led to his death is something of a blow to the official narrative.
One of the parents of a student at the Bois d’Aulne college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), near Paris, had filed a complaint with the authorities that Paty’s actions amounted to the “dissemination of pornographic images”, according to France Info.
Explaining what had happened in class during his interrogation, Paty told investigators that he had “suggested that my students look away for a few seconds if they thought they might be shocked for one reason or another.”
“At no time did I tell the students: ‘Muslims, you can go out because you are going to be shocked.’ And I did not ask only the students who were of the Muslim faith,” he insisted.
“My goal when I asked them to look away was that they didn’t feel offended.”
Four days later Paty was publicly beheaded by Chechen migrant Aboulakh Anzorov, who came to France as a refugee, after a pair of teenagers from the school waited with Anzorov for two hours and pointed him out in exchange for a few hundred euros.
Those two teenagers, along with a father accused by the authorities of effectively launching a “fatwa” against the teacher in an online diatribe which was shared on social media by a mosque, are now set to face charges in connection with Paty’s murder, along with several others.