PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th May, 2021) Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party, has been acquitted together with her fellow European lawmaker, Gilbert Collard, in a probe into posting images depicting gruesome crimes committed by the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, banned in Russia) on their Twitter accounts back in 2015, media reported on Tuesday.
According to the BFM tv broadcaster, the decision was made by a court in Nanterre, which found no proselytism in the messages posted by Le Pen and Collard.
French prosecutors put Le Pen under a formal inquiry over the photos depicting the atrocities committed by terrorists, which she tweeted in December 2015. One of the pictures showed the decapitated body of US correspondent James Foley, which Le Pen posted in response to the comparison drawn by a famous French journalist between the IS and her party.
The tweets came one month after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which resulted in 130 deaths and hundreds of injured. Even though Le Pen later deleted the photo of Foley, she was charged with "spreading violent images" in March 2018, several months after France's lower parliamentary house, of which Le Pen was a member, stripped her of immunity so that the prosecutors could open a case against her over the tweets. Collard lost his parliamentary immunity in September 2017.
Le Pen declared that the whole investigation violated freedom of expression and was meant to target her in a media war.
