France - Teacher who hanged himself - pupil admits he lied

The sad circle is almost complete on the story first reported here last month of the teacher who committed suicide following accusations that he had hit one of his pupils.

On Friday the 15-year-old boy admitted that he had made the whole story up. His teacher, Jean-Luc Bubert, had never hit him.

"He lied," Francis Les, a lawyer for Bubert's family told a press conference on Friday.

In a statement the public prosecutor of the northern French town of Laon, Olivier Hussenet, confirmed that the boy had admitted that he had never been hit.

"The teacher neither raised his hand to the boy nor hit him," he said in a statement. "And after medical examinations it was clear that there was no evidence that the boy had suffered a broken tooth."

You might remember the story. In September, Bubert, a teacher at the César-Savart secondary school in Saint-Michel near Laon, was taken in for several hour's worth of questioning after the parents of the pupil made an official complaint.

The boy had maintained that the 39-year-old science teacher had kept him back at the end of class and hit him during a heated exchange of words.

Bubert was eventually released because as far as the police had been concerned there didn't seem to be enough evidence to back up the claim.

But after almost a full day of questioning he went home and hanged himself.

At the time Hussenet, said that it had been one person's word against another's and that there had been no witnesses to the alleged incident.

He insisted said there had been no direct link between Bubert's detention and his later suicide, offering the more likely explanation that a combination of personal factors had been involved as Bubert had been going through a messy divorce.

"The detention and questioning by the police could have been the trigger that led him to take his life."

But in the intervening period since Bubert's death and the boy's admission not only had reservations been circulating about the veracity of the original claims, but also the role of the police, with the father of the teacher asking for access to files to prove his son's innocence.

As the mayor of the village in which Bubert lived told French television, the whole case highlighted the problem of how you assess the credibility of a child's accusations in relation to the reputation of a teacher.

"In France we have to find some sort of balance between the accusations a child makes and the presumption of innocence of someone until they're proven guilty," said Thierry Verdavaine.

"Unfortunately we have the tendency to go from one extreme to the other.

And that's a matter that concerns Bubert's former colleagues, and probably many others within the profession.

"On a purely human level of course we have lost a co-worker and it was an enormous waste of a life," said Alain Dambron, - a maths teacher at the school.

"It's also something that could happen to any of us, to be accused of something similar at any time. I know that under similar circumstances I would also find myself alone," he added.

So who's to blame for a man having taken his own life?

Was it the fault of the 15-year-old who made the false accusations, or more likely as Bubert's father seemed to imply a number of factors including a system that encourages the readiness of the police to accept a story based on little evidence without looking first to protect the innocence of his son.

"Justice had its own part to play in the way in which it went about investigating the case of Jean-Luc," he said.

The responsibility of the boy is of course enormous, but simply to burden him with complete and total blame for the affair would be also be wrong", he added.

The boy has since changed schools, but will face prosecution for making false accusations.