Brahim Chnina was heard on Monday December 2 as part of the Samuel Paty trial. The father of the schoolgirl who started the rumor said he regretted having believed his daughter.
Brahim Chnina is accused at the trial of the murder of Samuel Paty of terrorist criminal association. He is being prosecuted for having participated in “the development and dissemination of videos presenting false or distorted information intended to arouse a feeling of hatred” against the professor who was beheaded on October 16, 2020.
His daughter had told him a few days before the attack, when she was excluded from her college, that Samuel Paty had shown caricatures of naked Mohammed published in Charlie Hebdo in class. According to the girl, the teacher asked the Muslim students to leave the class if it bothered them. In reality, it was a lie, the student was not even present in class.
However, his father had spread this rumor on WhatsApp groups. Brahim Chnina then went to the Conflans-Saint-Honorine college in the company of Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui. They asked to speak to the principal, but the tone quickly escalated. The same evening, the father films himself with a surgical mask on his face declaring that “his daughter was shocked following the behavior of her teacher, he was a thug. This thug must no longer stay in National Education”.
Brahim Chnina regrets having believed his daughter
Brahim Chnina took the stand this Monday, December 2. He said he “infinitely regrets” his actions and that he “believed his daughter 100%”. The president then asked him if he felt he had been manipulated, he replied: “On this story, yes, but I was also fooled by myself.” He thus admitted that he could not put everything on his child’s back: “She made a mistake and I did the same”, assuring that he had believed “that Mr. Paty did not like Muslims. The accused admitted to having “made the unforgivable mistake of giving the contact details of the teacher and the school”, claiming to have been unaware of the potential consequences of this choice and to have wanted to protect his daughter.
Furthermore, Brahim Chnina pointed the finger at the principal of the college. According to him, she had not informed him of his daughter’s absence from class, which he considers to be a determining factor. “If she had said to me, ‘your daughter wasn’t in class,’ I might have backed out, but instead she kicked me out of a meeting,” he said. tell. An argument very poorly received by the court.
The interrogation also offended Gaëlle, one of Samuel Paty’s sisters, “He always comes back to the same positions, the same postures, he has been harping on from the start”, she confided to franceinfo at the exit of the audience. This speech was even considered “shocking”. “It shows that he did not understand his share of responsibility, his actions and that he could have consequences. That he did not understand, or that he does not want to say it today to the court”.
Brahim Chnina also denied being “a terrorist”. However, the investigations revealed “nine contacts over the period from October 9 to 13, 2020 between Brahim Chnina and Abdoullakh Anzorov”, the assassin of Samuel Paty. The accused, however, assured that he did not remember such exchanges. He faces 30 years of criminal imprisonment, with a final verdict delivered on December 20.