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French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal he said that the French state will report for slander a student who had accused the principal of her school of having hit her on the arm for refusing to remove her Islamic headscarf. Due to the student’s accusations, the principal had received numerous death threats, due to which he finally decided to resign. Wearing the Islamic veil, as well as any garment or accessory that openly signals a religious affiliation, is prohibited in French schools by a law on secularism approved in 2004.
On February 28, the principal of the Maurice-Ravel institute, in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris (a peripheral district of the French capital), had asked three students to remove their headscarves. According to the reconstruction of the prosecutor’s office, two of them accepted while the third ignored the request. The latter, who is already older than her, then reported the principal, claiming that after her refusal the man attempted to force her to remove her veil by force. The Paris court on Wednesday he filed the complaint presented by the student.
Because of the affair, the principal began to receive many online threats, some considered particularly serious. On March 22, approximately three weeks after the events, the man (whose name was not released publicly) then announced his intention to resign to protect his own safety and that of the school. The rest of the school staff expressed closeness to the director, who in any case would have retired in a few months.
The issue was commented on in newspapers and by various national politicians, who condemned the threats. On Wednesday, for example, the prime minister received the principal, and the Minister of Education, Nicole Belloubet, visited the school where she worked. A 26-year-old man believed to have made some of the threats has been identified and charged: his first hearing is fixed in April.
Death threats to school staff are a particularly sensitive topic in France, also due to some recent incidents in which two teachers were killed. In 2020, Samuel Paty, who taught at a school in the northern suburbs of Paris, was beheaded in a terrorist attack after a false rumor spread online that he had discriminated against his Muslim pupils. Just five months ago a twenty-year-old boy killed a teacher in a high school in Arras, in the north of the country.
– Read also: How did the first day of the abaya ban go in French schools?