A 15-year-old schoolboy is facing a prison sentence after pointing a gun at his teacher and shouting ‘put your head down’, as if he was about to execute her.
The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, appeared before a youth judge in France on Sunday following the terrifying incident.
Shortly after 10am last Thursday the boy and a group of friends allegedly forced their way into a classroom where the teacher was marking work at Branly High School in Creteil, a south east suburb of greater Paris.
The boys can be heard sniggering, as the bespectacled female teacher remains calm and carries out the instructions that are being barked at her.
A video was filmed, and it was posted on social media on Friday – going viral, and causing shock and outrage across the country.
President Emmanuel Macron called on his Interior Ministry to ‘take all measures to ensure that what happened is punished, and that this type of behaviour is permanently banned from schools’.
The boy – whose face is hidden in the video – was reported by the teacher, who has also not been named, and he later turned himself into a police station with his father.
He insisted that the pistol was fake, and he was simply enjoying a joke, without any intent to intimidate his teacher.
In turn, she made a complaint of ‘violent threats with a weapon’, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Even if a weapon is a fake, the charge still stands when a pistol is ‘used as if it is a real one,’ said a legal source close to the case.
The incident comes at a time of increasing violence among school children in France, especially on housing projects around major cities.