A French schoolgirl admitted that she lied about her teacher almost five months after a social media campaign and spread the lies around the world, killing the teacher in a terrorist attack, Sky News report.
The girl, who has not yet been nominated, said she lied about her teacher asking Muslim students to leave the classroom before displaying the sign of the Prophet Mohammad in a satirical magazine, the French newspaper Le Parisien reported first reported.
“She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her classmates asked her to be a spokesperson,” the girl’s lawyer Mbeko Tabula told AFP.
She allegedly lied to her father and said she was suspended because she did not agree with her teacher, Samuel Paty, because she displayed the images in the free speech class. However, she was never at class that day and was actually suspended the previous day because she missed too much school.
The girl’s father believed her daughter’s lies and started a social media campaign against Paty.
After the campaign became popular, Paty was assassinated and beheaded by Abdullah Anzorov.
Paty’s family lawyer reacted to the new information, saying that the family already knew that the girl was not in class that day, so they would know she was lying, BBC report.
“To come and say now, sorry, I believed my daughter’s lies, it’s really bad,” Virginie Le Roy, the family lawyer, told RTL radio.
After Paty’s death, the French government closed for six months a mosque and threatened to jail someone for six months who was disobedient.
France adopts strong secular stance and government launched a bill against extremism against religion after the attack took place.