Like many a school truant, the 13-year-old girl was keen to prevent her father from discovering she had been suspended because of repeatedly failing to turn up for lessons.
So she made up a story. The teenager said her history teacher, Samuel Paty, had instructed Muslim students to leave the classroom so he could show the rest “a photograph of the Prophet naked”.
It must have seemed a harmless enough lie, but it sparked a chain of events that led to unimaginable horror.
Ten days later, the teacher was dead – decapitated by a Islamist terrorist. Paty’s family were left devastated, France traumatised and the girl and her father facing criminal charges. Two other teenagers, who took money from the assassin, Abdullakh Anzorov, are also under investigation.
On Sunday, Le Parisien revealed that the girl, known only as Z, had admitted that she had wrongly accused Paty. The paper said she confessed to the investigating anti-terrorist judge that she had lied, and that she was not even in the class where Paty showed pupils controversial caricatures from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
The newspaper said the girl had lied because she wanted to please her father.
“She would not have dared to confess to her father the real reasons for her exclusion shortly before the tragedy, which was in fact linked to her bad behaviour,” Le Parisien reported.
On 6 October last year, Paty, a history and geography teacher, gave a class on the subject of “dilemmas”. He posed the question “to be or not to be Charlie?”, referring to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag used to express support for the paper after a terrorist attack on its offices in January 2015 that killed 12 people.
Paty is said to have invited Muslim pupils who thought they might be shocked to close their eyes or briefly stand in the corridor while he showed pupils a caricature of the Prophet.
Two days later, the girl told her father that Paty, 47, had asked Muslim students to leave the class before showing the caricature. She said she had expressed her disagreement with the teacher and he had suspended her from classes for two days.
After hearing the story, her outraged father, Moroccan-born Brahim Chnina, 48, shared a video on Facebook in which he denounced Paty and called for him to be sacked from the secondary school at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. A second, equally angry video was posted on social media accusing Paty of “discrimination”.
Chnina complained to the school and the police, claiming Paty was guilty of “diffusing a pornographic image”, and sparking accusations of Islamophobia at the school.
Once set in motion, the issue snowballed on social networks and reached Anzorov, 18, a radicalised Chechen migrant living in Normandy and scouring the internet for a cause. On 16 October, Anzorov travelled to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, paid two teenagers from the school to identify Paty as he was leaving for home on a Friday evening and beheaded him.
The lie had led to the killing of a man and father of a five-year-old boy.
The girl reportedly stuck to her story until police told her several classmates had confirmed she was not present for the lesson and that Paty had not instructed Muslim pupils to leave the class as she had claimed.
Investigators reportedly said she was suffering from an “inferiority complex” and was devoted to her father.
The girl’s lawyer, Mbeko Tabula, insists the weight of the tragedy should not fall on the shoulders of a 13-year-old girl.
“It was the father’s excessive behaviour, making and posting a video incriminating the professor that led to this spiral,” Tabula told the Parisien. “My client lied, but even if it had been true, the reaction of her father was still disproportionate.”
Chnina, who is under investigation for “complicity in a terrorist killing”, told police he had been “idiotic, stupid”.
“I never thought my messages would be seen by terrorists. I didn’t want to harm anyone with that message. It’s hard to imagine how we got here, that we’ve lost a history professor and everyone blames me.”