Life saver Lassana Bathily
The siege in the Hyper Cacher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes in Paris involved a life-saver – Lassana Bathily, who saved at least 15 Jewish customers’ lives, including those of two children. He herded them into a basement cold store and hid them from the gunman. The Mali-born man’s actions became a source for comfort before the protest/peace rally which drew millions yesterday.
Bathily is aged 24 and studied in Paris. He told a French TV station that he advised a group of customers to calm down, and not to make a sound, “because if they heard us they could come and take us”. He quietly turned off the lights and the fridge, and after about 10 minutes, they all heard a noise outside and then a female cashier calling that they had been spotted and Coulibaly might come and kill them. Some of the shoppers sought refuge in a locked cool room, whilst others complied with the killer’s demand, among them a man identified by the French media as Mickael B, who found Coulibaly shouting to the hostages about “Palestine, French prisons, his brothers in Syria and other things”. Coulibaly stopped to make a sandwich and when one of the customers grabbed for his gun, he pulled it and shot the customer dead. Coulibaly also gave a radio interview by telephone and inadvertantly left the line open, so they could continue taping his words. He warned them his personal attack on that day was due to the West’s interference in Iraq, Syria and Mali. Coulibaly then accused the hostages of paying taxes which went towards suppressing Muslims. He countered against an objection with the words, “You don’t have to pay taxes, I don’t pay mine.” He was angry about his “brothers” being put in prison, yet on Saturday night his mother and sisters condemned his killing spree as “odious”. AFP made a statement that they had no support for what had been done and that there would be no future support and hoped there would be no confusion between these odious acts and the Muslim religion.
Chief Rabbi of Brussels – a relative of some of the hostages, said, “They were saved thanks to the Muslim employee of the supermarket. ” Bathily’s Facebook page was full of tributes to his bravery, including calls for him to be given the French Medal of Honour. Tributes were also paid to the victims, named as Francois-Michel Saada, 60, Philippe Braham, 40 Yohan Cohen 22, and Yoav Hattab, 21.