Muslim in deli shepherded his Jewish customers to safety
A MUSLIM employee at the supermarket at the centre of the Paris terror attacks has been hailed as a hero for saving the lives of Jewish customers.
Lassana Bathily put his own life at risk to protect people from Islamic fanatic Amedy Coulibaly – by hiding them in a cold store in the basement of Hyper Cacher.
Bathily came up with his quickthinking plan when the gunman burst through the front doors on Friday.
The 24-year-old shop assistant, who comes from Mali in West Africa, found six terrified customers a safe hiding place downstairs while the terrorist prowled the aisles above them.
‘When they ran down, I opened the door [to the cold store],’ Mr Bathily revealed yesterday.
‘There were several people who came to me.
‘I turned off the light, I turned off the freezer.
‘When I turned off the cold, I put them [hostages] in, I closed the door, and I told them to try to stay calm.’
The hostages had to spend three hours in the darkened room, with temperatures still below freezing, until armed police stormed the deli and Coulibaly went down in a hail of bullets.
When the hostages were eventually freed, they congratulated Mr Bathily.
There are now calls for him to receive an honour from the French state, after he was likened to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who helped about 1,200 Jews escape the Holocaust. In a further show of unity between faiths in France yesterday, senior Muslims were cheered as they added flowers to a pile of floral tributes at the site of the Hyper Cacher massacre.
They were led by Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of the city’s Drancy mosque, and they were accompanied by a local rabbi and a woman wearing a sash in the French national colours of red, white and blue.
Their gesture of solidarity as they arrived was met with
cries of ‘Bravo’ from the watching crowd.
Mr Chalghoumi made a similar tribute on Thursday at the site of the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
On that occasion he described the terrorists responsible for the atrocity as ‘criminals’ and ‘barbarians’ who had nothing to do with Islam.
As the group left yesterday, the crowd, which included Jews, Muslims and Christians, began to chant ‘tous ensemble’, meaning ‘everyone together’.