Like the crowd of the school, the 13-year-old girl wanted to prevent her father from discovering that she had been suspended because he had repeatedly failed to show up for lessons.
So she made up a story. The teenager said her history teacher, Samuel Paty, instructed Muslim students to leave the classroom so he could show a picture of the Prophet naked to the rest.
It may have seemed like a harmless enough lie, but it unleashed a series of events that led to unimaginable horror.
Ten days later, the teacher was killed – beheaded by an Islamic terrorist. Paty’s family is devastated, France is traumatized and the girl and her father are facing criminal charges. Two other teenagers, who took money from the assassin, Abdullakh Anzorov, are also being investigated.
Le Parisien revealed on Sunday that the girl, known only as Z, had admitted that she had wrongly accused Paty. The newspaper said she admitted to the investigating anti-terrorism judge that she had lied and that she was not even in the class where Paty pupils showed controversial caricatures of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
According to the newspaper, 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 shortly before the tragedy, which were in fact related to her bad behavior,” Le Parisien reported.
On October 6 last year, Paty, a history and geography teacher, gave a class on the dilemmas. He posed the question “to be Charlie or not?”, Referring to the #JesCharlie hat brand used to support the newspaper following a terrorist attack on his offices in January 2015 in which 12 people were killed.
Paty allegedly invited Muslim students who thought they might be shocked to close their eyes or stand briefly in the hallway while showing a caricature of the Prophet to students.
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 that he suspended her from the class for two days.
After hearing the story, her angry father, Moroccan-born Brahim Chnina (48), shared a video on Facebook in which he denounced Paty and asked him to be discharged from high school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine word. A second, equally angry video was posted on social media in which he accused Paty of ‘discrimination’.
Chnina complained to the school and police, claiming Paty was guilty of spreading a pornographic image and accusing Islamophobia at the school.
After it got underway, the issue snowed on social networks and reached out to Anzorov, 18, a radical Chechen migrant living in Normandy and searching the internet for a case. On October 16, Anzorov travels to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, pays two teenagers from the school to identify Paty as he leaves for home and beheads on a Friday night.
A seemingly harmless lie led to the murder of a husband and father of a five-year-old boy.
The girl apparently kept to her story until the police told her that several classmates had confirmed that she was not at the lesson and that Paty Muslim pupils had not instructed her to leave the class as she claimed.
Investigators said she was suffering from an “inferiority complex” and was devoted to her father.
The girl’s lawyer, Mbeko Tabula, maintains that the weight of the tragedy should not fall on the shoulders of a 13 – year – old girl.
“It was the father’s excessive behavior, which made and posted a video accusing the professor, that led to this spiral,” Tabula told the Parisien. “My client lied, but even if it was true, her father’s reaction was still out of proportion.”
Chnina, who is being investigated for ‘complicity in a terrorist murder’, told police he was ‘idiot, stupid’.
“I never thought terrorists would see my messages. I did not want to harm anyone with the message. It’s hard to imagine how we got here, that we lost a professor of history and everyone blames me. ‘