Like many absences from school, the 13-year-old insisted on preventing her father from discovering that she had been suspended for not attending classes repeatedly.
So she made up a story. The teenager said that her history teacher, Samuel Paty, instructed Muslim students to leave the classroom so that he could show others “a photograph of the naked Prophet”.
It must have seemed like a harmless lie, but it triggered a chain of events that led to unimaginable horror.
Ten days later, the professor was dead – beheaded by an Islamic terrorist. Paty’s family was devastated, France traumatized and the girl and her father facing criminal charges. Two other teenagers, who accepted money from the killer, Abdullakh Anzorov, are also under investigation.
On Sunday, Le Parisien revealed that the girl, known only as Z, had admitted that she had wrongly accused Paty. The newspaper said she confessed to the anti-terrorist judge that she had lied and that she was not even in the class where Paty was showing controversial cartoons of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo to students.
The newspaper said the girl lied because she wanted to please her father.
“She would not have dared to confess to her father the real reasons for her exclusion just before the tragedy, which was actually linked to her bad behavior,” reported Le Parisien.
On October 6 of last year, Paty, a history and geography teacher, gave a class on the theme “dilemmas”. He posed the question “whether or not to be Charlie?”, Referring to the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie used to express support for the newspaper after a terrorist attack in its offices in January 2015 that killed 12 people.
Paty is said to have invited Muslim students who thought they would be shocked to close their eyes or stay for a while in the hall while he showed students a caricature of the Prophet.
Two days later, the girl told her father that Paty, 47, had asked Muslim students to leave the class before showing the caricature. She said she expressed her disagreement with the teacher and he suspended her from classes for two days.
After hearing the story, his outraged father, Brahim Chnina, 48, of Moroccan origin, shared a video on Facebook in which he denounces Paty and asks him to be fired from high school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. A second equally furious video was posted on social media accusing Paty of “discrimination”.
Chnina complained to the school and the police, alleging that Paty was guilty of “spreading a pornographic image” and sparking accusations of Islamophobia at school.
Once started, the issue grew like a snowball on social media and reached Anzorov, 18, a radicalized Chechen migrant who lives in Normandy and scours the internet for a cause. On October 16, Anzorov traveled to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, paid two teenagers at school to identify Paty when he was returning home on a Friday night, and beheaded him.
An apparently harmless lie resulted in the death of a man and the father of a five-year-old boy.
The girl allegedly kept her story until the police said that several classmates confirmed that she was not present for class and that Paty did not instruct Muslim students to leave the class as she had claimed.
Investigators said she suffered from an “inferiority complex” and was devoted to her father.
The girl’s lawyer, Mbeko Tabula, insists that the weight of the tragedy should not rest on the shoulders of a 13-year-old girl.
“It was the father’s excessive behavior of making and posting a video incriminating the teacher that created this spiral,” Tabula told Parisien. “My client lied, but even if it was true, her father’s reaction was still disproportionate.”
Chnina, who is under investigation for “complicity in a terrorist murder”, told police he had been “stupid, stupid”.
“I never thought that my messages would be seen by terrorists. I didn’t want to harm anyone with that message. It is hard to imagine how we got here, that we lost a history teacher and everyone blames me. “