murder of Samuel Paty

On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty ( French: [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.