Muslim Supermarket Clerk Hid Jews in the Freezer

Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at Paris Kosher grocery store Hyper Cacher, saved several people by hiding them in a walk-in freezer when a gunman laid siege to his workplace on Friday.

Amedy Coulibaly burst into the market and opened fire, killing 4 people. He took several shoppers hostage and threatened to kill them if police stormed the printing shop where Cherif and Said Kouachi, who killed 12 people in an attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier in the week, were holed up in a village to the north.

Bathily, identified by French media as a Malian Muslim, helped several customers to safety as the chaos unfolded. “I went down to the freezer, I opened the door, there were several people who went in with me. I turned off the light and the freezer,” Bathily, 24, told French network BFMTV. “I brought them inside and I told them to stay calm here, I’m going to go out. When they got out, they thanked me.”

It’s unclear exactly how many people Bathily managed to hide inside the freezer in the store’s basement. City councillor Malik Yettou said that six people and a baby escaped the gunman by hiding there, while BFMTV put the number at about 15.

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13 Comments

  • B'H

    Ouch – Lassana Bathily saved so many lives, so sorry that he was cuffed and mistaken as a murderer.
    Lassana, if you ever see this, thank you for your heroic deed! May you be blessed.

    • Milhouse

      Really? Are you seriously suggesting that a person coming out of a hostage situation should not be cuffed and treated as a potential kidnapper?! Are you saying you wouldn’t have done that?

  • From paris

    It’s not true! He did not save anyone. He cared about himself and ran, another worker, a Jew, saved them!

  • Milhouse

    What heroism is anyone seeing here? Even if we take his own account as 100% true, what did he do? Nothing. He ran to the freezer, and found several people had followed him there, so he let them in. What else could he have done? He deserves no praise for that. Then what did he do? He didn’t go back and fetch more people, and help them sneak away to the freezer. That would have been heroic. No, he went straight to the freight elevator and got away. Why didn’t he take these people from the freezer with him?

  • Dear Millhouse

    Someone just said they were sorry he was cuffed, they didn’t say he should never have been cuffed. Sometimes you say you’re sorry about something even though it happened for a reason. You seem to be harboring a lot of anger that expresses itself often in a strongly argumentative manner. Sometimes I get it , and sometimes I find it distasteful. Oh well, I’m sure you’ll be angry at this, too.

  • YMSP

    It would be great to change the headline from “Muslim Supermarket Clerk Hid Jews in the Freezer” to something that’s less open to misinterpretation. Just saying…