Man jailed for threatening to behead son’s female teacher in French town

A man has been jailed for six months after threatening to behead his son’s female teacher after she disciplined him at school for disruptive behaviour.

The 47-year-old man was sentenced on Thursday, less than a week after the incident in Le Fauga, a small village of about 2,600 people close to the French city of Toulouse, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the BBC.

The teacher received official protection and was placed on leave, France‘s education minister Édouard Geffray wrote on X on Thursday.

The incident comes months after French lawmakers passed legislation aimed at protecting staff, academic directors of national education services, and rectors of academies from the risk of violence and hostility from students’ parents.

The law states that education authorities can force a student to change schools if a parent displays threatening behaviour towards a teacher or other staff.

Geffray described the reported facts of the incident as “of extreme gravity,” and offered his full support to the teacher, her colleagues, students and the their families.

“This situation will give rise to one of the first applications of the decree published this summer to protect staff from threats and violence by students’ parents,” he continued.

“No teacher should have to fear carrying out their profession. Attacking one of them is attacking the entire institution,” the statement concluded.

The case comes six years after Samuel Paty, a teacher in a Paris suburb, was stabbed and beheaded in an attack outside the school he taught at by an 18-year-old Moscow-born Chechen refugee and radicalized Islamic fundamentalist.

He was shot dead by police shortly after the incident.

Brahim Chnina, the father of one of Paty’s students, was among eight adults convicted of assisting the killer.

Chnina was found guilty of criminal terrorist association after circulating online content detailing his daughter’s false claim that Paty had shown material depicting Muhammed naked and asked Muslim students to leave the room during a freedom-of-expression class—an act the courts found contributed to Paty’s murder.

The social media posts called for mobilization against the teacher.

Paty did show an image of Muhammed in the class, but the claim that Muhammed was naked and that he asked Muslim students to leave was a fabrication; the girl who made the claim was not present in the class the day the images were shown, and later admitted to prosecutors that she had lied.

Paty had shown caricatures published by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The release of those images triggered a deadly extremist massacre in the Charlie Hebdo newsroom in 2015, where 12 people, including staff and visitors, were shot dead.

Six teenagers, including the student who made the false allegations against Paty, were also convicted for their roles in his killing.