‘We won’t give up on Mohammed cartoons’, vows Macron

Two teenagers accused of pointing out French teacher Samuel Paty to his killer are charged with complicity in terrorist murder.

French Republican guards carry Samuel Paty's coffin at the Sorbonne on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

Two teenagers accused of pointing out French teacher Samuel Paty to the killer who beheaded him were on Wednesday charged with complicity in terrorist murder, prosecutors said, as the nation paid homage to the slain educator.

“We will not give up cartoons,” President Emmanuel Macron earlier told a ceremony at the Sorbonne in Paris attended by the family of Paty, who was targeted for having shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a civics class discussion on free speech early this month.

Mr Macron awarded France’s highest civilian prize, the Legion of Honour, to Paty and said he had been slain by “cowards” for representing the secular, democratic values of the French Republic. “He was killed because Islamists want our future,” he said. “They will never have it.”

Earlier, anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said the two teenagers — aged 14 and 15 — had been in a group of pupils who shared €300-350 offered by the killer to help find Paty. The two stayed with the killer, Chechnya-born 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, for more than two hours waiting for Paty even after he told them he wanted to “humiliate and strike” him over the Mohamed caricatures, Mr Ricard said.

Anzorov decapitated Paty with a knife as he made his way home on foot from the junior high school where he taught in the suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine outside Paris. He tweeted an image of the teacher’s severed head on Twitter before he was shot dead by police.

The pair are among seven people authorities have charged over the killing. The parent of one of Paty’s pupils, who started the social media campaign against the teacher even though his daughter was not in class when the cartoons were shown, was also charged with the same offence as the two teenagers.

AFP