‘I CLIMBED UP TO SAVE HIM, VOILA’
France offers hero who saved child a job, citizenship
PARIS • It took less than a minute of extreme bravery for Mamoudou Gassama, a Malian migrant, to scale the façade of a Paris building and save a four-year-old boy clinging to the edge of a balcony for dear life.
Barely 24 hours later, the 22-year-old’s spectacular five-storey rescue earned him an invitation to the Elysée Palace, where President Emmanuel Macron on Monday hailed his “courage and devotion” and offered him French nationality and a job as a fireman.
His feat highlights the quandary facing Paris in dealing humanely with a migrant influx that homeless charities this month warned risked ending in tragedy, after two refugees drowned in canals and a third was stabbed.
France has been transfixed by video footage of the Malian’s exploits, which has been viewed millions of times on social media and turned Gassama into an overnight celebrity with the nickname “Spider-Man.”
The video shows a crowd cheering on Gassama from the street as he pulls himself from balcony to balcony with his bare hands.
With a neighbour in the apartment block in Paris’s multi-ethnic 18th arrondissement unable to reach the boy, Gassama manages to grab the four-year-old. The crowd goes wild.
“I ran. I crossed the street to save him,” he told Macron at their Elysée meeting. “When I started to climb, it gave me courage to keep climbing.”
God “helped me” too, said Gassama, who said that his legs felt like jelly once the child was safe and sound. “Thank God I saved him.”
Gassama told Le Parisien newspaper, “I climbed up to save him, voila.
“I did it because it was a kid. I love children very much,” he said.
“I didn’t think about the floors,” he said, referring to the building he scaled. “I didn’t think about the risk.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced that the city would support his effort to stay in France.
“He explained to me that he arrived from Mali several months ago, dreaming of building his life here,” Hidalgo said via Twitter. “I told him that his heroic gesture is an example for all citizens.”
According to BFM TV, the boy had fallen from the balcony of his father’s sixthfloor flat to the floor below and had somehow managed to cling on until Gassama came to his rescue.
While “Spider-Man” was scaling the building, it transpired that the child’s father — who lives alone with his son — was outside playing Pokémon Go on his mobile phone. He now faces a maximum two-year prison term and $45,000 fine for dereliction of parental duty.
In excerpts of their conversation posted on the President’s Facebook page, Macron said: “Bravo. You saved a child. Without you, no one knows what would have become of him. You need courage and the capability to do that.
“This is an exceptional act. We’ll obviously be setting all your papers straight and if you wish it, we will start the process of naturalization so that you can become French.”
The president said Gassama deserved a “meaningful” job. “What you have done corresponds with what firemen do. If this fits your wishes, you could join the fire brigade so that you can do (such acts) on a daily basis.”
Gassama, who lives in a migrants hostel in the suburb of Montreuil, told Macron how he tried to cross the Mediterranean in March 2014 to reach Italy after a long, arduous spell in Libya, but was caught by police and beaten. “But I wasn’t discouraged,” he said.
After crossing at an unspecified date, he was allowed to legally stay in Italy, but decided to join his older brother, who has lived in France for decades.
His red-carpet treatment comes just weeks after Macron enacted an asylum and immigration bill, which migrants’ rights groups criticized as inhumane. Macron said there was no contradiction between this and rewarding Gassama’s bravery.
There was approval across the political spectrum for Gassama to be granted honorary citizenship. But Nicolas Bay, general secretary of the far-right Front National party, only supported the move on condition that the government throw out “all illegal immigrants.”
Gassama is due to receive a residency permit on Tuesday and start working as a fireman. The Paris fire brigade said: “Mamoudou Gassama clearly has the required values to join.”
Despite leaving his fouryear-old alone, social services decided to return custody of the boy to the father, said to be “distraught.”