Europe 1 with AFP 5:50 p.m., December 2, 2021
A 14-year-old Afghan schoolboy, who had been accused in Marseille of "apologizing for terrorism" for remarks he allegedly made during a tribute to the beheaded professor Samuel Paty, was released by the court.
No element has demonstrated its radicalization.
The Marseille prosecutor's office confirmed to AFP on Thursday this information from the investigation site "Marsactu" specifying that he did not intend "to appeal this acquittal" while he had requested two months in prison suspended 'hearing.
The facts dated from November 2020 at the college "Chape" in Marseille, during an improvised discussion during physical education and sports (EPS).
The young boy, who spent twelve years in Afghanistan, is said to have repeated that Samuel Paty "did not have to do that", in reference to the professor beheaded on October 16, 2020 by a Chechen refugee because he had shown caricatures of Muhammad to his students.
He would have answered "yes" to comrades who asked him if he condoned the terrorist act and affirmed that he would have "filmed and posted on Instagram" the image of his own history-geo teacher if she had kept the same words.
"He didn't know what happened to Samuel Paty"
"He's been living in France for two years, he speaks French badly and he is being dragged to court because a horde of kids has fallen on him, telling him: so, you agree! He answered" yes " or "no" to a series of questions asked at the same time. Nothing in all of this comes under the apology of terrorism ", explains his lawyer, Me Anne-Sophie Grardel, according to whom his client who" does not watch TV, did not know what had happened to Samuel Paty ". "It's just a problem of freedom of expression. Why wouldn't he have the right to say that, for him, it is not appropriate to make a caricature of Muhammad? That was his point. But we is in a context of social fear and over-media coverage, ”she emphasizes. In her description, the principal of the college,absent at the time of the facts, had indicated to the police officers that the teenager would have said "me too, I would have killed him", remarks which were never corroborated thereafter.
The teenager's father fled the Taliban
The teenager had been indicted for "apologizing for terrorism" but the investigation failed to substantiate his radicalization, on the contrary.
His father, a policeman in Afghanistan who now runs a snack bar, fled the Taliban and obtained political asylum in France.
An educator testified that the teenager was "brought up in values opposed to those advocated by radical Islamism" and a psychologist that he was not "in a process of radicalization".
The teenager released by justice, is now preparing a CAP in another college in Marseille.
Four new reports under study
In the Bouches-du-Rhône department, after the assassination of Samuel Paty and the tributes that followed his death, the National Education had sent eight reports to the prefecture in the fall of 2020, six of which were taken to court.
Some 540,000 students are enrolled in primary and secondary education in the Aix-Marseille academy.
One was the subject of a classification without follow-up for lack of offense, four of a classification without follow-up after reminder of the law by the delegate of the prosecutor, the last case being that of the Afghan schoolboy.
"On the occasion of the commemoration from one year of the assassination of Samuel Paty, four new reports were sent. They are being studied," the Marseille prosecutor's office told AFP.