A 13-year-old student confessed that she lied about a French teacher who was beheaded after showing cartoons of her 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 cartoons to the students during a civics class on free speech.
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The unidentified girl told police she was lying about being in class and falsely accused Paty of asking Muslim children to leave class while showing pictures.
Her father, who has been charged in connection with the murder, posted several incendiary videos on Facebook based on the testimony of his daughter who identified Paty.
“Everything that happened in the investigation proved very early that he lied,” Paty’s family lawyer Virginie Le Roy told RTL radio on Tuesday.
He said he 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 classmates had asked her to be her spokesperson.”
Le Roy added: “A spokesman for what? Of lies, of 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 sparked a new debate over freedom of expression, the integration of the large French Muslim population and the role of social media in increasing hatred.
Paty was killed in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine by Russia’s 18-year-old Muslim extremist who had seen the online campaign against the teacher mounted by the school’s father and another man, a well-known Islamist preacher.
The two people behind the Facebook videos have been charged with “complicity in the murder” for their posts and are awaiting trial in prison, while the school has been charged with defamation.
Police shot dead the killer.
A new security bill being debated in the French parliament would make it a heinous crime to post information online about a public official knowing that doing so could cause them harm.