The events date back to November 2020. At Collège Chape in Marseille, a boy who had spent twelve years in Afghanistan allegedly said repeatedly during an impromptu discussion in gym class that Samuel Paty “shouldn’t have done that”. He was referring to the teacher who had been beheaded by a Chechen refugee on October 16, 2020, for showing cartoons of Mohammed to his students. He allegedly answered “yes” when asked by classmates if he approved of the terrorist attack and claimed that he would have ” taped the image of his own history and geography teacher and posted it on Instagram” if she had made the same remarks, Le Point reports.
The headmistress, who was not present at the time of the incident, had told the police that the youth had said: “I would have killed him too”, but these remarks were never later confirmed and the court decided to acquit the youth because there was no tangible evidence of his radicalisation. “He has been living in France for two years, speaks poor French and is being hauled into court because a group of children attacked him and told him: ‘So, you approve of this! He answered “yes” or “no” to a series of questions asked at the same time. None of this is glorification of terrorism,” his lawyer Anne-Sophie Grardel told Le Point.
In the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, following the murder of Samuel Paty and the tributes that followed his death, the Ministry of Education had forwarded eight complaints to the prefecture in the autumn of 2020, six of which were prosecuted, the weekly reports.In one case, the case was dropped due to the absence of a criminal offence, in four cases the case was dropped upon request by the prosecutor’s representative, and the last case involved the Afghan student.