French far-right politician Marine Le Pen will stand trial for tweeting pictures of ISIS atrocities, a Paris judge has said.
Just weeks after the 2015 ISIS attacks on Paris, the leader of the National Rally party tweeted out distressing images showing victims of ISIS. Her tweet was in response to a comparison between her party - then the National Front - and the terrorist group by a journalist.
The 50-year-old trained lawyer will appear before a court on charges of circulating "violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity" and that can be viewed by a minor, according to AFP.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a fine of €75,000 euros (Dh310000).
One of the pictures she shared showed the decapitated body of ISIS victim and American journalist James Foley.. Another showed a man in an orange jumpsuit being run over by a tank, and the third a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.
“Daesh is this!" Ms Le Pen wrote in a caption.
In 2018, Ms Le Pen was ordered to undergo psychiatric assessment in relation to the tweets, in a move the politician called “crazy”.
The prospect of a trial is a further legal blow for Ms Le Pen, who was ordered last month to reimburse the European Parliament nearly 300,000 euros in funds she was accused of defrauding the EU.
The parliament claimed she used funds destined for EU parliamentary assistants to pay an aide for work carried out in France.
Additional reporting by AFP