A French court has sentenced seven men and a woman to prison for their role in a hate campaign that led to the October 2020 murder of teacher Samuel Paty in a Paris suburb.
The sentences issued range from three to 16 years.
The attack occurred after social media posts falsely claiming that Paty showed his students obscene images of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson on freedom of expression.
Chechen Muslim extremist Abdullahi Anzorov killed Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher, at a high school in the Parisian suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorine.
Anzorov was shot dead by police at the scene minutes after the 47-year-old was killed.
His enthusiasm was fueled by allegations circulating online that Paty had just days earlier ordered Muslims to leave a classroom containing 13-year-olds, before pictures of the Prophet Muhammad were displayed.
In fact, Paty was teaching a lesson on freedom of expression, and before showing one of the controversial images published by Charlie Hebdo for the first time, he advised pupils to avert their eyes if they feared being offended.
In the absence of the killer, this trial was for the people who provided him moral or material support.
Over the course of seven weeks, a court heard how a 13-year-old schoolgirl's lies spiraled out of control thanks to social media.
Among those sentenced on Friday was Ibrahim Shanina, the schoolgirl's father.
Shanina began an online campaign against the teacher and sought help from the extremist Islamic activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who has also now been convicted.
Two of the killer's friends who were with him when he bought weapons were also convicted, as well as four people with whom he shared messages on an extremist chatline.
The defense argued that none of the eight had any idea of Anzorov's intentions, and that their words and actions only became criminal when he carried out his act.
But the judge decided that lack of prior knowledge was not a defense, because what they did had the effect of incitement.
