Eight people have been on trial since early November, charged with contributing to the climate of hatred that led to an 18-year-old of Chechen origin beheading teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris in 2020.
The accused include Brahim Chnina, the 52-year-old Moroccan father of the adolescent testifying on Tuesday.
Then aged 13, the teenager falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.
She was not in the classroom at the time.
“I would like to apologise to the family,” the 17-year-old, who has not been named, told the court. “I destroyed your lives, I am sorry.”
Also on trial is Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old French-Moroccan Islamist activist.
He and Chnina spread the teenager's lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecution, of ‘designating a target’, ‘provoking a feeling of hatred’ and, ‘thus preparing several crimes'.
Both men have been in pre-trial detention for the past four years.
The teenager told the court that she lied to her mother to justify why she had been suspended from school for two days over her behaviour and repeated absences.
“I was in panic and stress,” she said. “I told her I had been in class and that I wasn't happy with what went on there and that the teacher excluded me. That we looked at cartoons.”
Sefrioui posted a video describing Paty as a ‘teaching thug’.
He also staged an ‘interview’ with the teenager outside the school, whispering to her what to answer. The adolescent reiterated the falsehoods.
“I thought somebody would stop me in my lying, but nobody ever said that I wasn’t in class,” she told the court on Tuesday.
She stuck to her story even after Paty’s death. Only following her arrest and 30 hours of interrogation did she admit to investigators that she had made it all up.
The teenager, whose delivery in court was matter-of-fact, showed emotion only when she talked about her father.
“Without my lies, none of us would be here,” she said, sobbing. “I used my father’s naivete and kindness.”
She added that, “my father says you must always respect teachers”, a remark that prompted an astonished “really?” from the court’s presiding judge.
The teenager was sentenced to 18 months’ probation in December 2023 after being convicted of slander.
Paty had used the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished Prophet Mohammed cartoons that, in 2015, led to Islamist gunmen storming its offices, killing 12 people.
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