Murder of Samuel Paty

On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty (French pronunciation: [samɥɛl pati]), a French secondary school teacher, was attacked and killed in Éragny, Val-d'Oise, Île-de-France, France, by an Islamic terrorist.

The perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian 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. 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, including an image of Muhammad naked with his genitals exposed. She later admitted that she lied about the material shown and had been absent from the class. 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". 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. In 2015 and 2016, Islamist terror attacks killed over 200 people in France. 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 Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, as well as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, both 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.