Originally published 2020-11-13.
In November 2020, the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported that an 11-year-old boy at a primary school in the Spandau district of Berlin had threatened his teacher with the same fate as Samuel Paty, the French history teacher murdered weeks earlier. According to the head teacher, Karina Jehniche, an imam who was at the school spoke to the boy at once, and the school sent him home after talking with his parents.
The story was picked up internationally, mostly through the Russian state broadcaster RT, and spread fast on social media. This page sets out what was actually reported, what was not, and the wider events in France, Austria and Germany that made a child's words so alarming to adults that autumn.
What the Berlin school reported
The account comes from the school itself, as relayed by Der Tagesspiegel and then by RT on 11 November 2020. According to that account, there were two incidents involving the same pupil:
- During a minute's silence for Samuel Paty, the boy allegedly told a classmate that it was acceptable to kill someone who had insulted the Prophet Muhammad.
- Some time later, he allegedly told his teacher: "I'll do the same with you as the boy did with the teacher in Paris." Classmates were reported to be shocked.
The imam, who has not been named, reportedly told the child that his view was wrong and had nothing to do with Islam. The school then contacted the parents and sent the boy home. No arrest or criminal case was reported, which is expected: in Germany, children under 14 cannot be held criminally responsible, so cases like this are handled by schools, parents and youth welfare services.
It is worth being clear about the limits of the story. It rests on one school's description of events given to one newspaper. The boy was not identified, as is right for a child of his age, and no follow-up about the outcome was published in the reports we could check.
Why the threat struck a nerve: the murder of Samuel Paty
On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and civics teacher at the Collège du Bois-d'Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, north-west of Paris, was attacked and beheaded near his school. His killer, 18-year-old Abdoullakh Anzorov, was born in Moscow to a Chechen family, had grown up in France and held refugee status. Police shot him dead minutes later.
Days earlier, during a lesson on freedom of expression, Paty had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He reportedly offered Muslim pupils the chance to leave the room first. A pupil's father then launched an online campaign against him, based partly on his daughter's account of the lesson. In March 2021 the girl admitted she had not been in class that day and had lied.
France held a national tribute at the Sorbonne on 21 October 2020, where President Emmanuel Macron awarded Paty the Légion d'honneur and called him "a quiet hero." The legal cases took years. Six teenagers were convicted in December 2023, and in December 2024 eight adults were convicted, with sentences of up to 16 years, including two friends of the attacker and the father who led the online campaign.
What happened in French schools afterwards
When French schools returned from the autumn holiday on 2 November 2020, they held a commemoration for Paty. More than 400 incidents of disruption, threats or justification of the attack were recorded around those tributes, and some young people were arrested. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said 66 inquiries had been opened into alleged support for terrorism after the murder.
One detail is often misreported. Claims that children as young as eight were under investigation for defending the killing concerned France, not Germany. Some English-language versions of the Berlin story blended the two, making it sound as if German police were questioning eight-year-olds. We found no report saying that.
A wider autumn of attacks in Europe
The Berlin incident came during a run of attacks that left teachers and parents across Europe on edge:
- 29 October 2020, Nice: a 21-year-old Tunisian man who had recently arrived in Europe through Lampedusa killed three people at the Notre-Dame basilica.
- 2 November 2020, Vienna: a 20-year-old gunman killed four people in the city centre before police shot him dead. He had been sentenced in 2019 to 22 months in prison for trying to cross from Turkey into Syria to join the Islamic State group, and had been released on parole after about eight months.
Security services had long warned about Europeans who travelled to fight for the Islamic State and later came home with combat experience. None of the attackers in Conflans, Nice or Vienna was a returning fighter, though the Vienna attacker had tried and failed to reach Syria.
Germany had suffered its own deadliest Islamist attack four years earlier. On 19 December 2016, Anis Amri, a Tunisian whose asylum claim had been rejected, drove a hijacked truck into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin. Twelve people died that night, including the truck's original driver, and a first responder who was badly injured died in 2021, bringing the toll to 13. Germany has also seen smaller attacks with knives and explosives, though fewer than France in this period.
How schools handle threats from young children
A threat of violence from an 11-year-old is serious, but it is not the same as a plan. Children of that age often repeat words they have heard at home, online or in the playground, sometimes to shock adults during a highly charged news moment. Educators who deal with these cases generally look at a few questions:
- Did the child show intent or a plan, or was it an outburst?
- Where did the child pick up the idea, and is anyone at home or online encouraging it?
- Is the teacher, and are other pupils, safe and supported?
- Which outside services, such as youth welfare offices or prevention programmes, should be involved?
In the Berlin case the school's response matched that pattern: immediate intervention by a trusted adult from the child's own faith community, contact with the parents, and removal from class while the situation was assessed. Teachers who have been threatened also need support, since such incidents can be frightening even when the risk turns out to be low.
Reading stories like this fairly
Reports like this travel quickly because they combine a child, a teacher and a terrible recent murder. That makes care important. The allegation concerns the words of one boy, not Muslim pupils as a group, and the clearest rejection of his view in the story came from an imam. It is possible to take a threat against a teacher seriously, and to defend teachers' freedom to discuss difficult subjects, without turning one child's words into a statement about millions of people.
It also helps to check where a story comes from. This one began with a named head teacher speaking to a respected Berlin newspaper, which gives it more weight than an anonymous post. Its international spread, however, ran largely through RT, a state-funded outlet that often highlights divisive stories about Western Europe, and some retellings added details that were not in the original account.
Sources: RT, 11 November 2020, citing Der Tagesspiegel; Wikipedia: Murder of Samuel Paty; Wikipedia: 2016 Berlin truck attack; Wikipedia: 2020 Vienna attack; Wikipedia: 2020 Nice stabbing.
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