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.
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.
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.
He told the court he feared what awaited him if he were sent back. Chechens were the first to be despatched to the front in Ukraine, he said, and a return would be a one-way trip to death.
The deputy prosecutor said he had left Hauts-de-Seine eight times, “even at night”, and asked what a man of his record was doing at Parc Astérix.
His lawyer, Figen Aydin, said she had hoped the case would be handled like any other breach of a residence order.
On October 16, 2020, Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen origin, beheaded Paty near his school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the Yvelines west of Paris. Paty was 47 and taught history and geography.
Days earlier Paty had given a civic education lesson on freedom of expression, using Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, as he had in previous years.
He warned pupils that some images might shock them and said anyone who wished could look away or leave the room for a few minutes. He did not single out Muslim pupils or order them out.
Five or six pupils stepped outside briefly. Staff later said there was no confrontation.
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.
Classmates and the investigation established that none of this was true. She later admitted the fabrication.
Her father, Brahim Chnina, had posted videos of the lie online, condemning Paty and his school. This was picked up by radical activists who amplified the false claims, among them the preacher Abdelhakim Sefrioui.
Anzorov, who was living in Évreux, in Normandy, northwest France, then tracked Paty down and killed him.
Anzorov was shot dead by police. Epsirkhanov, a childhood friend from Évreux, was convicted of helping him obtain the knife. He has always denied knowing Anzorov’s intention to kill Paty.
At the first trial he said he had taken €800 from Anzorov to find him a working firearm but had not managed to do so.
On December 20, 2024, a special assize court in Paris sentenced him to 16 years for complicity in terrorist murder. Seven other defendants were convicted alongside him over the campaign of hatred that preceded the killing, with Chnina given 13 years and Sefrioui 15.
An appeal opened in Paris on January 26, 2026 for four of the men. The March 2026 appeal requalified the offence and cut the term, after which he was released and made subject to the residence order pending expulsion.
The August 31 sentence is separate from that terrorism case and relates only to the breach of the administrative restriction.
Six teenagers were due to go on trial behind closed doors on November 27 in connection with the beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, a murder that shocked the country. https://t.co/F7ewmKdKDp
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) November 27, 2023
