A student who unleashed a deadly online hate campaign against a French professor after he showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to students admitted to lying and spreading false claims about him, her lawyer said on Monday.
The girl claimed that Professor Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by an Islamic extremist on the street in October last year, asked Muslims to leave class when he showed the cartoons.
The girl’s father subsequently filed a legal complaint and extended the charges online, prompting an 18-year-old Chechen refugee to track Paty in the city of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris.
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“She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her colleagues asked her to be a spokeswoman,” her lawyer Mbeko Tabula told AFP on Monday, confirming a report in the Parisien newspaper.
Paty showed the drawings, which were first published in Charlie Hebdo magazine and are considered offensive by many Muslims, during a civic education class in which students discussed freedom of expression and blasphemy.
A Republican guard holds a portrait of Samuel Paty in the courtyard of Sorbonne University during a national memorial event, Wednesday, October 21, 2020 in Paris. (AP Photo / Francois Mori, Pool)
The student, who had already been threatened with expulsion for disciplinary problems, was not in the class.
She has since been accused of slander, while her father and another man, an Islamic preacher and activist, have been accused of “complicity in murder” for the murder.
Paty’s killer was shot dead by the police shortly after the attack.
The Parisien newspaper reported on Monday that its last contact was with someone in Syria who is a member of a jihadist group.
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.
