Remember French schoolteacher Samuel Paty? He was the brave soul who, for a class on freedom of speech, showed his high school class the Charlie Hebdo caricatures of Muhammad. He instructed Muslim students that they were free to leave the classroom if such a sight would disturb them. A Muslim girl, who was not even in school that day — she had been banned for two days because of misbehavior, and did not want her father to find that out — told her father that she had been in Mr. Paty’s class when he had shown caricatures of a “naked Muhammad.” The maddened father reported this misinformation at a Muslim website. Another Muslim, a Chechen named Abdoullakh Anzorov, who had nothing to do with the school, having read the report, then planned, and carried out his plan, to decapitate the helpless Paty as he was walking home from school.
In turn, the police then tracked down and killed the killer. And another Chechen, Azim Epsirkhanov, who had obtained the knife the murderer used to kill Paty, was sentenced originally to sixteen years in prison for “complicity in terrorism,” and that was then changed to seven years for “criminal association.” The French government decided, as it has been in the throes of trying to arrange his deportation, to place him not in prison, but under house arrest. Now he has been caught enjoying himself at an amusement park, the Parc Astérix.. More on this alarming event can be found here: “Chechen convicted over Samuel Paty murder returns to jail after amusement park trip,” by Carl Deconinck, Brussels Signal, September 1, 2026:
A Chechen man convicted of supplying the knife used to murder the French history teacher Samuel Paty has been sentenced to a further year in prison after he was found at Parc Astérix in breach of his house arrest.
Azim Epsirkhanov, 25, appeared before the criminal court in Senlis, north of Paris, on August 31 under the fast-track procedure.
The court also imposed a permanent ban on his entering French territory, according to Le Parisien.
By that is meant that the French government has been in the process of deporting him — which will now take place only after he has served this new one-year prison sentence — and once that is achieved, he will be forbidden from ever entering France again.
Judges found that he had left Hauts-de-Seine, the département (administrative district) west of Paris where he was required to remain, and gone to the amusement park at Plailly, in the Oise, north of the capital.
Police stopped him in the car park at about 3.30pm on August 28.
He had been placed under house arrest at his partner’s home by prefectural order while the French State sought to deport him. He was also required to report to a police station twice a day.
He was released in April 2026 after an appeal court in March reduced a 16-year sentence for complicity in a terrorist murder to seven years for criminal association.
Why such leniency? He was complicit in murder. He denies he knew what the knife he obtained was to be used for, but he also knew that Anzorov had first asked him to obtain, for 800 euros, a working firearm, but none was to be found. What was that firearm for, if not to shoot a man? Why else would he then have asked Epsirkhanov to obtain instead a knife large enough to slice off a man’s head? Why did the court change the original and correct charge of “complicity in a terrorist murder” to the much milder one of “criminal association”?
He is challenging an obligation to leave French territory, and has lodged a request to that end with the administrative court.
Epsirkhanov told the court there had been “a misunderstanding, a misreading on my part” of the prefectural decision. He said he had kept to the twice-daily reporting requirement and had not grasped that the order also barred him from leaving Hauts-de-Seine.
“I never sought to evade this measure,” he said, adding that he wanted to resume family and working life.
Epsirkhanov is still hoping soon to be “resuming family and working life” in France. One hopes that he will instead be deported just as soon as this one-year prison sentence has been served. In today’s France, however, one cannot be sure.
He told the court he feared what awaited him if he were sent back. Chechens were the first to be dispatched to the front in Ukraine, he said, and a return would be a one-way trip to death….
It’s not any concern of the French what happens to him once he is sent back to Chechnya. Besides, it is only his word for it that Chechens are being rounded up by their government and forced to fight on Russia’s side. Draft-dodging is not a reason for asylum to be granted.
A 13-year-old girl in one of his classes was not present for the lesson. She had been suspended for two days for truancy and poor behaviour, unrelated to Paty.
To explain the punishment to her father she claimed the teacher had told Muslim pupils to identify themselves and leave, shown a “naked” image of the Prophet, and excluded her for objecting.
Lies, all lies, from this school girl, and these lies, which her father accepted and then posted at a Muslim website, led inexorably to the decapitation of a French teacher who only wanted to provide his students with a lesson on freedom of speech.
How is it that someone under house arrest while deportation proceedings are going on, and presumably wearing an electronic ankle monitor, managed not only to leave the house he was living in, but also to travel to a completely different département, Hauts-de-Seine, on eight separate occasions? Where was the monitoring? And why was Epsirkhanov’s original sentence of sixteen years for “complicity with terrorism” changed to seven years for “criminal association”? Judges in France need to be less soft-hearted. Perhaps the almost certain ascension to power of the National Rally, which Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella head, will provide the right atmosphere for hardening their hearts.
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