An eight-year-old boy in in the city of Nice, in southern France, was questioned by local police for comments he made supporting the gunmen who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices last month.
The boy refused to observe the minute of silence in honor of the 17 victims of the Paris attacks, according to the New York Times. The boy later defended the terrorists that attacked the newspaper.
"The boy told his schoolteacher, 'We must kill the French. I am with the terrorists. Muslims have done well. The journalists deserve to die,'" Fabienne Lewandowski, deputy director of security in the Alpes-Maritimes department said, according to the Times.
"In the current context, the principal of the school decided to report to police what had happened," Marcel Authier, who is in charge of the region's public security said according to NPR. "We summoned the child and his father to try and comprehend how an 8-year-old boy could hold such radical ideas."
The boy, who was not named because he is a minor, is Muslim, according to the French National Observatory Against Islamophobia. By French law, people under the age of 13 cannot be criminally charged. The boy's father reportedly made "offensive and threatening comments" to the head of the parents' association of his son's school, Lewandowski told the Times.
The father and the boy were questioned by police officers on Wednesday.
France has cracked down on people making statements defending the terrorists. French media reports that following the January 7 attack, French prosecutors launched 117 legal proceedings for "incitement to racial hatred" and "glorification of terrorism." Of those, 12 have resulted in jail sentences.
Comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala wrote in a Facebook post, "Tonight, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly," referring to the man who killed a policewoman and took hostages in a kosher supermarket. Dieudonné's trial is scheduled for February.