Sister of beheaded teacher accuses France of
failing to protect school staff
Mickaëlle Paty, whose brother Samuel was killed by an
extremist, speaks out after Paris head resigns following alleged death threats
Kim
Willsher
Fri 29 Mar
2024 14.06 CET
The sister
of Samuel Paty, the French teacher beheaded by an Islamist terrorist in 2020,
has accused the authorities of failing to appreciate or act on the continuing
threat extremists pose to school staff.
Speaking
after alleged death threats to a Paris headteacher, who resigned last week,
Mickaëlle Paty said the state appeared to have learned little from her
brother’s killing.
Paty said
there had been a “multitude of faults” by the school and education authorities,
and ministers needed to study all the loopholes that could have led to her
brother’s death. In particular, she accused them of ignoring his fears for his
life after he and the school were named on social media, along with calls for
violent action against him.
“The
intelligence service was able to identify all these elements, there was no flaw
in the collection of information. But the problem is was what was done with it.
It’s as if there was a pause, where they waited to see if there’s going to be
an act.” It was “totally obvious that he should be withdrawn … and benefit from
protection”, she said.
Paty
accused the government of “denial” and said it had a “wait-and-see” attitude
after her brother was threatened, accusing it of “of abandonment” and
“cowardice”.
She said
she had not intended to speak to the press but the lack of government action
had pushed her into the spotlight. “The lack of progress, the lack of awareness
of what happened to my brother in the last three and a half years has pushed me
to be more and more proactive to force the state to do something,” she told the
television and radio channel BFMTV-RMC.
She said
there had been some progress, in that since her brother’s death threats to
teachers had elicited a “fairly rapid reaction” from the authorities to protect
them, but it was not enough.
Last week,
the head of the state-run Maurice Ravel secondary school in Paris, known for
its European and international sections, resigned in an email to colleagues,
citing “security reasons” following death threats after he had asked a student
to remove her headscarf on the premises. Religious symbols including headwear
are banned in French schools.
The
headteacher said he was leaving “for his own safety and that of the school”,
while the education authorities claimed he was leaving for “personal
convenience” and taking “early retirement”. The pupil claimed the head had been
violent towards her but the Paris public prosecutor’s office dismissed her
complaint. Police are now investigating allegations of cyber-harassment linked
to the death threats.
Paty, 47, a
history and geography teacher, was stabbed then decapitated near his secondary
school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine after showing a class
caricatures of the prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo
as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France. His attacker,
Abdoullakh Anzorov, a radicalised Chechen-born 18-year-old, was shot dead by
police.
A
13-year-old girl who was not in the class and falsely claimed Paty had asked
Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the classroom was convicted of
making false accusations last December. Five other teenagers were convicted of
criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence.
Mickaëlle
Paty’s lawyers have given the government two months to respond to a request for
“official recognition of the state’s responsibility for the attack” on her
brother before lodging a legal complaint. She said the move was “to do justice
to Samuel’s memory … and to prevent similar tragedies happening again”.
Last
October, an Islamist extremist stabbed to death another French teacher,
Dominique Bernard, 57, at a secondary school in the north-eastern town of
Arras.
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