Over 200,000 people have signed an online petition calling for a Muslim man, who led people to safety during the siege of a Paris supermarket, to be given French citizenship and France’s highest honour.
According to The Independent, a Change.org petition has called on President Francois Hollande to grant Lassana Bathily French nationality and the Legion d'honneur for saving 15 lives during the siege last week.
Bathily, originally from Mali, reportedly helped terrified customers to safety in a switched-off storeroom freezer to avoid gunman Amedy Coulibaly.
"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," The Independent reported him as saying. Bathily later escaped through a fire escape to talk to police.
Police had originally thought Bathily 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, who was the main suspect in the fatal shooting of a policewoman a day earlier in a Paris suburb- killed four hostages before police shot him dead after storming the building.
A massacre by Islamic extremists at its Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and subsequent attack on a kosher supermarket killed 17 people.
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