According to the girl’s lawyer, a 13-year-old schoolgirl confessed that she lied about a French teacher who was beheaded after showing his cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Samuel Paty, a high school teacher in a city near Paris, was killed by a radical last October Chechen teenager after showing students the comics during a civilian class on free speech.
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The unknown girl told police she lied about being in class and Paty falsely accused her of asking Muslim children to leave the classroom while showing the photos.
Her father, who is charged in connection with the murder, posted several firearms on Facebook based on his daughter’s testimony that Paty identified.
“Everything in the investigation showed very early on that she was lying,” Paty family lawyer Virginie Le Roy told RTL radio on Tuesday.
She said she was “skeptical” about the version of events the girl told. The girl’s lawyer, Mbeko Tabula, told AFP on Monday: “She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her classmates asked her to be a spokesperson.”
Le Roy added: ‘A spokesperson for what? Of lies, of events that never happened? This explanation does not convince me and makes me quite angry because the facts are serious, it is tragic. ‘
The assassination of Paty shocked France and led to a new debate on freedom of speech, the integration of France’s large Muslim population and the role of social media in sharpening hatred.
Paty was killed in the city of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine by the 18-year-old Muslim extremist from Russia, who saw the online campaign against the teacher by the schoolgirl’s father and another man, a well-known Islamic preacher, set up.
Both individuals behind the Facebook videos are charged with ‘complicity in murder’ over their posts and awaiting trial in jail, while the schoolgirl is charged with libel.
The killer was shot dead by police.
A draft of new security law being debated in the French parliament would make it a prison sentence to publish information online about a civil servant knowing it could harm them.