Teacher beheaded by girl's lies (13)
Consternation at the trial of the gruesome murder of French teacher Samuel Paty in France: the girl, 13 at the time of the facts, who said her teacher had shown caricatures of Mohammed during class has admitted in court that she lied and was not even present at all in the lesson in question.
The lies spread by the now 17-year-old girl led to the teacher being beheaded by a Chechen Islam extremist.
After the girl's lie, the story began to take on a life of its own and the teacher was openly pilloried on social media. He was mentioned by name, after which a radicalized Muslim murdered the French teacher.
What really happened in class
The teenage girl admitted at the trial how teacher Paty allegedly announced that he would show caricatures of Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of a lesson on free speech. Those images might shock some students, so the teacher suggested that Muslim students could cover their eyes. But the 13-year-old girl told a completely different version of the facts at home, with disastrous consequences. She told her parents that the teacher had sent the Muslim students away from class. But in reality she was actually even not present in this lesson, she was at home sick at the time. She claimed to her parents that she had been kicked out of class because of the caricatures, but that turned out to be all a lie.
The now 17-year-old girl was not put on trial at the assize trial that started on Monday in Paris, but was sentenced to an 18-month suspended prison sentence in a juvenile court last year. Seven men and one woman are on trial for the terrorist murder. Among them also the girl's father, who posted hate videos online aimed at the teacher.
(SR for Tagtik/Source: Le Parisien/Illustration picture: Unsplash)