A 13-year-old school confessed to lying about a French teacher who was beheaded after showing cartoons with the Prophet Muhammad, according to the girl’s lawyer. Samuel Paty, a high school teacher from a city near Paris, was killed in October last year by a radical Teenage chickens after showing cartoons to students during a civics class about free speech.
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The unidentified girl told police she lied about being in class and falsely accused Paty of asking Muslim children to leave school while showing photos.
Her father, who was charged in connection with the murder, posted several incendiary videos on Facebook based on the testimony of his daughter who identified Paty.
“Everything in the investigation showed very early that he lied,” Paty’s lawyer, Virginie Le Roy, said Tuesday.
She said she was “skeptical” of the girl’s version of events. On Monday, the girl’s lawyer, Mbeko Tabula, told AFP: “She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her colleagues asked her to be her spokesperson.”
Le Roy added: “A spokesman for what? Lies, events that never happened? This explanation doesn’t convince me and makes me quite angry, because the facts are serious, they are tragic.”
Paty’s assassination shocked France and led to a new debate about freedom of expression, the integration of the large Muslim population in France and the role of social media in hate speech.
Paty was killed in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine by the 18-year-old Muslim extremist from Russia, who had seen the online campaign against the teacher mounted by the schoolgirl’s father and another man, a well-known Islamist preacher.
Both people behind the videos on Facebook have been accused of “complicity in the murder” in connection with their posts and are awaiting trial in prison, while the school has been accused of slander.
The killer was shot by police.
A draft security law to be debated in the French parliament would make it a criminal offense to publish information about a civil servant online, knowing that this could harm them.