Good young man receives jail sentence for threats that the teacher ‘will die like Samuel Paty’

A 19-year-old man from the city of Nice, in southeastern France, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for threatening a teacher that “he will die like Samuel Paty”, who was beheaded in October northeast of Paris, the Nice the prosecutor’s office said Saturday.

The high school graduate was convicted by the prosecutor of “advocating terrorism online” and “making death threats.”

Speaking at trial on Friday, the young man’s defense was that he was “making a joke” and trying to impress one of the teacher’s students.

According to newspaper Good Morning, the young man had heard through social networks that the teacher in his 30s had questioned some of his students on suspicion of cheating in a mock high school exam.

The young man tracked down the teacher on social media and sent him “threats similar to those received by Samuel Paty, who was brutally murdered in October after he showed cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression.

The teacher’s attorney said his client had gone through two extremely harrowing weeks after being forced to stop work and remove his name from his mailbox while police tracked down the source of the threats.

The defendant, who had no criminal record, faces up to seven years in jail. You have ten days to appeal the prosecutor’s decision.

Since the deadly terrorist attack on Notre-Dame de Nice on 29 October, the city’s prosecutor’s office has carried out more than 20 investigations into defense of terrorism.

A man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for threatening people near the cathedral, according to prosecutor Xavier Bonhomme.