Heard as a witness this Tuesday, the teenager at the origin of the lie according to which Samuel Paty had taken Muslim students out of his class to show caricatures apologized in front of the family of the murdered teacher.
Already sentenced to 18 months in prison for slanderous denunciation, the teenager who had shared with her father a lie according to which Samuel Paty had taken Muslim students out of his class to show caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2020 was heard as a witness by the special assize court of Paris, this Tuesday, November 26, 2024. As a reminder, at the time, she was not present at the course in question, she so lied. Today, she gave her version of the facts before the magistrates and the family of the professor, who disappeared four years earlier.
“We end up here because of my lie”
“I wanted to apologize for my lie. To my family too. Because we find ourselves here because of my lie. If my father made a video, it is partly because of my lie”, she declared on the stand. “Today, I complain about not having seen my father for four or five months, but you haven’t seen Samuel Paty for four years,” she continues.
If the teenager did not attend the class during which Samuel Paty revealed the caricatures, she was excluded, two days earlier, on October 5, 2020, “because I was disrupting the class,” she explains. On October 7, she returned to class. “Two young girls in my class told me that they saw caricatures the day before and that it shocked them,” she says. It is then that the crazy rumor is launched, the lie is released to his parents.
“I destroyed your life”
Quickly, her father – Brahim Chnina – relayed the young girl’s message to his contacts, including Abdelhakim Sefrioui, an Islamic preacher. The schoolgirl’s father then published videos targeting Samuel Paty, before Sefrioui in turn published a video called “Islam and the prophet insulted in a public school”. It was through this video that the terrorist Anzorov learned of the existence of Samuel Paty. Brahim Chnina now faces up to 30 years in prison for terrorist conspiracy. Now 17 years old, the former student of the college where Samuel Paty taught assured that she “never had a problem” with him. “I destroyed your life,” she told the family of the murdered professor.