By Juliette Jabkhiro and Lucien Libert

PARIS (Reuters) – The father of a French student whose account of the use of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression led to the teacher’s brutal murder went on trial on Monday, accused of association with a terrorist network.

Days after Samuel Paty, 47, showed the cartoons to his students, in 2020, an 18-year-old attacker of Chechen origin repeatedly stabbed him and decapitated him in front of his school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris.

This happened after the father, Brahim Chnina, posted a series of videos on social media, wrongly accusing Paty of disciplining his daughter for complaining about class, giving Paty’s name and identifying the school.

Prosecutors accuse Chnina of collaborating with Abdelhakim Sefrioui, founder of a hardline Islamist organization, to incite hatred toward the high school teacher. Many Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad to be blasphemous.

“They put a target on the professor’s back,” Thibault de Montbrial, lawyer for Mickaelle Paty, Samuel Paty’s sister, told reporters. “Their public complaints… the videos they made attacking this teacher… this whole spiral led directly to the atrocious beheading of Samuel Paty.”

“It will be interesting to see how, after having created a whole chain of events from the letter A to the letter Y, they will say that they are not responsible for the letter Z.”

Both men are charged with association with a terrorist organization. Chnina’s lawyer declined to comment before the start of the trial.

Sefrioui’s lawyer, Ouadie Elhamamouchi, has said there is no evidence of contact between Sefrioui and the Chechen killer, who was shot dead by police.

Elhamamouchi told Reuters that Sefrioui would demonstrate to the court “that he has absolutely no connection to this heinous attack, which he has condemned from day one.”

Among the other six prosecuted in Paris alongside Chnina and Sefrioui are two associates of Paty’s killer, Abdullakh Anzorov. Prosecutors allege they knew of Anzorov’s plans to kill Paty and helped him buy weapons.

Both are accused of complicity in a terrorist murder and French media say they have both denied any wrongdoing.

Last year, a court found Chnina’s daughter and five other teenagers guilty of charges related to participating in a premeditated criminal conspiracy and helping to set up an ambush.

In reality, Chnina’s daughter was not in Paty’s class when the cartoons were shown and the court found her guilty of making false accusations and defamatory comments. French media said the 13-year-old girl made the accusations against Paty when her parents asked her why she had been suspended from school for two days.

The last trial will last until December.

Teachers at Paty’s school will follow the trial closely, said Antoine Casubolo Ferro, lawyer for 14 of their colleagues.

“They hope that the (French) republic, the justice system, will say: enough, don’t mess with the teachers… don’t mess with freedom of expression,” Casubolo Ferro told reporters.

(Reporting by Juliette Jabkhiro and Lucien Libert; Writing by Richard Lough and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Ros Russell)