Lassana Bathiley of
Jewish Supermarket Attack Will Be Given French Citizenship
A Change.org petition has called on President Francois
Hollande to grant Lassana Bathily a French nationality and the Legion d'honneur
for saving 15 lives during the siege on a kosher grocery store last week.
Bathily, 24, a Muslim who
is originally from Mali, helped customers to safety in a switched-off storeroom
freezer to avoid gunman Amedy Coulibaly who attacked the grocery store. He is
being hailed as a hero for ushering several customers into a walk-in freezer to
hide them from the attack. Almost 300,000 people have signed the online
petition to grant him citizenship.
The interior ministry
said on Thursday that Lassana Bathily will receive French citizenship and a
naturalization ceremony will be held on Tuesday.
Bathily, originally from
Mali, has lived in France since 2006 and requested citizenship in July,
according to the Interior Ministry.
“There are 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, I told them to stay
calm," He was reported saying.
He later escaped through
a fire escape to talk to the police.
Police originally thought he
was a conspirator, but later on he was able to give them details of the layout
of the store and where people were hiding.
Coulibaly, the main
suspect in the fatal shooting of a policewoman a day earlier in a Paris suburb
had killed four hostages before police shot him dead after raiding the
building. The raid was alomost simultaneous with that on a printing plant north
of Paris where two suspects in the deadly attack on the French satirical
newspaper Charlie Hebdo were holed up.
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