A 13-year-old student confessed that she lied about a French teacher who was beheaded after showing his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the girl’s lawyer. Samuel Paty, a high school teacher in a city near Paris, was killed last October by a radical Chechen teenager after showing the drawings to students during a civic education class on freedom of expression.
Twitter via Abaca / Sipa USA / AP Images
The unidentified girl told the police that she lied about being in class and falsely accused Paty of asking Muslim children to leave the class while he showed the pictures.
Her father, who was charged with connection to the murder, posted several arson videos on Facebook based on the testimony of his daughter who identified Paty.
“Everything in the investigation showed very early on that she lied,” Paty family lawyer Virginie Le Roy told RTL radio on Tuesday.
She said she was “skeptical” about the version of events told by the girl. 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 a spokesperson.”
Le Roy added: “A spokesman for what? Lies, events that never happened? This explanation does not convince me and makes me very angry because the facts are serious, they are tragic.”
Paty’s murder shocked France and led to a new debate about freedom of expression, the integration of France’s large Muslim population and the role of social media in fomenting hatred.
Paty was murdered in the city of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine by the 18-year-old Muslim extremist from Russia who saw the online campaign against the teacher set up by the student’s father and another man, a well-known Islamic preacher.
The two individuals behind the Facebook videos were accused of “complicity in murder” because of their posts and are awaiting trial in prison, while the student was accused of slander.
The killer was shot dead by the police.
A draft new security law that is being discussed in the French parliament would make it a justifiable crime to publish information online about a public official knowing that it could harm him.