The lawyer for the family of the beheaded French teacher Samuel Paty is “angry” at the revelation that a 13-year-old girl spread lies that led to her murder – and dissatisfied with the explanations given so far.
Virginie Le Roy, who represents the Paty family, said she did not buy the teenager’s excuse that peer pressure was part of the reason she lied about Muslim students being asked to leave the teacher’s class during a lesson at a school in west Paris.
“This explanation does not satisfy me, it makes me a little angry because the facts are serious, dramatic,” she told RTL radio, Agence France-Press reported.
The girl, who was not named, said Paty, 47, fired Muslim students in order to show the class a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.
Later, however, she thought that she was not present at the lesson and that she spread the false story to please her father, who then filed a complaint against Paty.
“Everything in the investigation showed very early that he was lying,” Le Roy said.
She said she was “skeptical” of the version of events now being reported by the girl – especially as she claimed that other classmates had asked her “to be their spokesperson”.
“A spokesman for what? Lies, events that never happened? Le Roy told the radio station.
The girl’s father organized a social campaign against Paty at the time because he showed the blasphemous image, which is considered very offensive by Muslims.
As the reaction grew against the teacher, he was killed by an 18-year-old extremist, Abdullakh Anzorov.
The girl’s lawyer claimed on Monday that she lied “because she felt trapped in a chain of events”.
“There was a real unease, she felt compelled to add to make this message stand out,” lawyer Mbeko Tabula said, Euro News reported.
Tabula confirmed that she was not there on the day of the incident in the classroom – highlighting her absence to be ill.
But the girl apparently had been suspended the day before and did not want her father to know about the punishment, the French newspaper Le Parisien reported.
The girl was accused of slander, while her father was arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice in a terrorist crime, Independent reported.
