French schoolgirl lied about teacher who was beheaded in terror attack

A French schoolgirl admitted to lying about her teacher almost five months after a social media campaign spread the lies around the world and the teacher died in a terror attack, Sky News reported.

The girl, who has not been named, said she lied about her teacher asking Muslim students to leave the classroom before showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that were in a satirical magazine, French paper Le Parisien first reported.

“She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her classmates had asked her to be a spokesperson,” the girl’s lawyer Mbeko Tabula told AFP news agency.

She reportedly lied to her father and said she was suspended for disagreeing with her teacher, Samuel Paty, for showing the images in the free speech class. However, she was never at class that day and was actually suspended the day before for missing 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 murdered and beheaded by Abdullah Anzorov.

Paty’s family lawyer responded to the new information saying the family already knew the girl wasn’t in class that day so they would have known she was lying, BBC reported.

“So to come and say now, sorry, I believed my daughter’s lies, that’s really weak,” Virginie Le Roy, the family lawyer, told RTL radio.

After Paty’s death, the French government closed a mosque for six months and threatened to jail anyone for six months who disobeyed.

France takes a vigorously secular stance and the government introduced an anti-religion extremism bill after the attack took place.