Four years ago today a French schoolteacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded by a confused youngster of the Islamic persuasion. In this case, I’m not just being facetious when I refer to Abdoullakh Anzorov as a “youngster”, since the Chechen migrant was just eighteen years old when he lopped a head for Allah while yelling “Allahu Akhbar” (which is Arabic for “I feel marginalized by a racist society”).
In the following video, Samuel Paty’s sister Mickaëlle Paty talks about the traumatic moment when she learned of her brother’s death, and her subsequent visit to the morgue to view his body.
Many thanks to Brunhilde for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:
See also the report at RAIR Foundation.
Video transcript:
| 00:00 | 16th October 2020. I was in the operating room because I’m an anesthetic nurse. It’s where I work. | |
| 00:06 | And a little bit after 8 p.m. I received an SMS message from my mother. | |
| 00:11 | “Samuel may have been killed in front of his school. Call me back on the landline.” | |
| 00:15 | This “may have been” was a bit surrealistic. One rarely puts the word “maybe” before the word “killed”. | |
| 00:21 | So, at that moment, I wasn’t sure if he had been killed or just wounded. | |
| 00:25 | I remember my mother, and behind her I heard my father crying. | |
| 00:30 | She told me that she heard in the news that a teacher called Samuel P. | |
| 00:36 | who taught at the “collège du Bois d’Aulne” had been killed by an Islamist. | |
| 00:43 | She ended by telling me just before hanging up, “They cut off his head.” | |
| 00:49 | You realized…? I realized right away what that phrase meant. | |
| 00:56 | I called the anesthesiologist who was on call with me that evening, | |
| 01:00 | and told him, “You have to come, you have to come.” They invited us to see his body | |
| 01:05 | in the mortuary of the Institut Medico-legal [forensic Institute in Paris] | |
| 01:09 | where my parents insisted on seeing him. So we entered this very dark room | |
| 01:17 | where one could just see this bright halo above his body | |
| 01:22 | with a white sheet that had deliberately been pulled up | |
| 01:26 | to the base of his neck to hide the mark of his decapitation. | |
| 01:31 | And there I didn’t recognize him. He essentially had wounds all over his face. | |
| 01:39 | And actually, I really didn’t | |
| 01:42 | want to recognize him, because I, at that moment, | |
| 01:47 | I did a great quarter turn on my heel, saying, “It’s not him. So let’s go. | |
| 01:51 | It’s OK. It was a mistake.” | |
| 01:54 | Until the end, I think I tried to push the last chance that it wasn’t him. | |
| 01:59 | And yet, when my mother screamed | |
| 02:02 | “Yes, it’s him,” I had to admit it. | |
| 02:05 | That what she screamed was true, “They slaughtered him!” |