A 47-year-old man in France has been sentenced to just six months in prison after threatening to decapitate his son’s primary school teacher.
Abdelkader B was sent directly to jail in Toulouse after the court determined his threats were too grave to warrant a suspended sentence.
He made the vile threat after his nine-year-old son was transferred to a different class for his poor behaviour.
On September 4, after a teacher told the boy not to “play the tough guy”, his father confronted her in the school car park and made the beheading threat.
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“If you were a man, I would have cut your head off,” he told her.
He then continued to issue threats inside the school building, including in the presence of the headteacher.
Presiding judge Fabrice Rives called the threats “extremely worrying” and of “great violence”, saying they inevitably recalled an event “that has remained in the minds of all French people” – the beheading of Samuel Paty.
Mr Paty, a history and geography teacher, was murdered by an Islamist terrorist outside his school near Paris in October 2020 after displaying cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a lesson about freedom of expression.
In a separate Islamist attack in 2023, French teacher Dominique Bernard was fatally stabbed at his school in Arras by a former pupil.
Two years prior, a religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced into hiding after showing a cartoon of Mohammed during a lesson on blasphemy.
He and his family remain under police protection and new identities, while a 2024 Government review concluded that local authorities, police, and the school trust “totally and utterly failed” him.
Back in France, Abdelkader B’s sentence went further than what prosecutors had sought – they had requested six months under electronic tagging rather than imprisonment.
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The teacher’s lawyer described the immediate incarceration order as “very rare”.
Having spent 14 years at the school, the 58-year-old teacher is now on sick leave and “traumatised”, according to her lawyer, and is weighing whether to remain in the profession.
The defendant’s lawyer urged the court to judge his client as a father rather than “in consideration of his Muslim religion”.
Abdelkader B apologised, telling the court: “I am not someone who is violent by nature. I don’t know what happened to me that day.”
Prosecutors claimed he had not understood the seriousness of what he said.
Two of Abdelkader B’s children are being sent to a different school under a decree introduced in July, which allows pupils to be transferred when a parent poses a serious threat to staff.
He was additionally banned from contacting the teacher or approaching the school for three years, and must complete a citizenship course.
French education minister Edouard Geffray, after the 47-year-old’s sentencing, said: “No teacher should be afraid to do their job.
“To attack one of them is to attack the institution as a whole.”
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