Sarah Knafo «indicates that 800 million euros are given by France each year to Algeria, whereas it would be 800 million over a period of five years according to the complaint», details the prosecution, which concludes that it “It is therefore more a question of insufficiently verified and rather imprecise information, rather than deliberately misleading».
On September 27, the prosecution closed the complaint, filed two days earlier, “on the grounds that the offense is not characterized», Specified the prosecution, requested by AFP.
Algiers criticized Sarah Knafo, representative of Eric Zemmour’s far-right party Reconquête! in the European Parliament, his statements on RMC radio on September 20.
«Do you know, for example, that we are giving 800 million euros to Algeria in public development aid? ?,” she said. She then took it back on X.
The public prosecutor recalls that the offense of “spreading fake news» “requires characterizing two elements”, namely “le misleading nature of the information, but also the fact of causing or risking causing a disturbance of public peacee.»
On the first point, “bad faith is not presumed as in matters of defamation, and cannot be upheld even when the information has been insufficiently verified”.
On the second point, the prosecution considered that the message of this elected official, “also broadcast as part of a public debate on development aid from foreign countries with regard to the national budget deficit while the Finance Law will to be examined soon”, had “obviously» not provoked «of disorder, panic, collective emotion and dismay».
Par Le360 Africa (with AFP)
03/10/2024 at 3:30 p.m.
