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MOSCOW (Reuters) – A teenager who beheaded a French school teacher in a murder that convulsed France has been buried in his native Chechnya after relatives repatriated his body, a local human rights expert said on Monday.
Abdullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old born in Muslim-majority Chechnya, was shot and killed in October by French police after murdering high school teacher Samuel Paty in a Paris suburb.
Anzorov had wanted to punish Paty for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to students in a lesson on freedom of expression. The cartoons are considered blasphemous by many Muslims.
Kheda Saratova, a human rights adviser to the Chechen authorities, said Anzorov was buried in a traditional Muslim ceremony in the Chechen village of Shalazhi and that his relatives and acquaintances had been in attendance, the Russian news agency RIA reported.
Other Russian media, including the Fontanka outlet in St. Petersburg, said Anzorov had been buried with honors on Sunday in Chechnya, part of Russia’s troubled North Caucasus.
A procession of dozens of people could be seen walking through snowy streets chanting prayers and carrying what appeared to be a body wrapped in green cloth in social media images posted by Fontanka.
Reuters could not immediately verify those reports and videos.
Caucasus Knot, which focuses on the region, reported that some 200 people had participated in the ceremony and that officials had closed the area for security reasons while it was taking place.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, has criticized French President Emmanuel Macron’s handling of the assassination, accusing him of inspiring terrorists by justifying cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as protected by free speech rights.
The Kremlin said Monday that it had no information about the burial, but condemned what it said was an act of terrorism that deserved “nothing more than deep condemnation and rejection.”
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; Additional reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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