A 13-year-old boy arrested for a TikTok publication judged to be an apology for terrorism

A post on TikTok presented as a joke led to the arrest of a 13-year-old teenager during the night from Thursday to Friday in Masny, near Douai, in the North. The schoolboy had distributed “a fictitious timetable designed by AI with the comment “tomorrow attack””, according to the Douai prosecutor, Frédéric Fourtoy. Don’t look for the “t” in attack, it didn’t appear on the post.

The video, reported on the Pharos platform, led to his arrest at his home at 3:20 a.m. and his placement in police custody for advocating terrorism. The first investigations, however, established that the young boy “had simply wanted to make a joke to amuse his classmates”. He deleted the publication “immediately” in the presence of investigators, his legal representative and his lawyer.

The teenager is summoned on December 14

For the prosecutor, the teenager “did not measure the ideological dimension” of his publication. The facts were consequently reclassified as “threats of crime against people materialized in writing, image or other object”.