Spectacular Rescue By Malian Immigrant Who Saves A Dangling Toddler By Scaling Up 4 Storeys In Paris.
Heroic act of real life spiderman climbing 4 storeys to save a toddler.
In
the video below you can witness how Mamadou Gassama heroically saved
the life of a four year old toddler in Paris who was dangling from a
balcony, four storeys high.
From undocumented migrant to meeting President Macron
When the French President Macron heard of Mamadou Gassama heroic act, he invited him over for a face-to-face meeting.
Mamadou left his home country Mali came to France a few months ago. When he was on his way with his girl friend to watch the Champions League final, he heard people shouting. When he saw the four year old toddler dangling from the balcony on the fourth floor, he did not think twice. Within 30 seconds he climbed to the fourth floor of the building and was able to bring the child into safety.
“I felt afraid when I saved the child,” he said, according to French news reports. “I started to shake, I could hardly stand up. I had to sit down.”
Mamadou had yearned to secure the requisite documentation to live legally in France, and his dream came true.
The French President Emmanuel Macron invited Mamadou on Monday and will be rewarded for his "exceptional act" with papers to legalise his stay in France, citizenship if he wants, and a job as a firefighter.
The father of the child was detained for alleged parental neglect, and is to appear in court in September. He left the child alone while he shopped. Prosecutor Francois Molins told BFM-TV. The whereabouts of the child's mother were unclear.
Source: New York Times
Mamadou left his home country Mali came to France a few months ago. When he was on his way with his girl friend to watch the Champions League final, he heard people shouting. When he saw the four year old toddler dangling from the balcony on the fourth floor, he did not think twice. Within 30 seconds he climbed to the fourth floor of the building and was able to bring the child into safety.
“I felt afraid when I saved the child,” he said, according to French news reports. “I started to shake, I could hardly stand up. I had to sit down.”
Mamadou had yearned to secure the requisite documentation to live legally in France, and his dream came true.
The French President Emmanuel Macron invited Mamadou on Monday and will be rewarded for his "exceptional act" with papers to legalise his stay in France, citizenship if he wants, and a job as a firefighter.
The father of the child was detained for alleged parental neglect, and is to appear in court in September. He left the child alone while he shopped. Prosecutor Francois Molins told BFM-TV. The whereabouts of the child's mother were unclear.
Source: New York Times
Full Story.
Paris ‘Spider-Man’ Saves Young Boy. Cue Debate on Migrants.
PARIS
— The 4-year-old boy seemed to be suspended from a balcony. An adult
standing on a nearby balcony seemed powerless to help. Disaster seemed
the only possible outcome.
Then, to
the nimble rescue on the streets of Paris on Saturday evening, came a
young man whom some French people have started to call the Spider-Man of
the 18th, referring to the arrondissement of Paris where the episode
unfolded.
With a combination of grit,
agility and muscle, the man hauled himself hand over hand from one
balcony to another, springing from one parapet to grasp the next one up.
A crowd that had gathered before he began his daring exploit urged him
ever upward, according to onlookers’ video that was shared widely on social media.
Finally,
after scaling four balconies, the man reached the child and pulled him
to safety. And suddenly, an act of individual courage and
resourcefulness began to play into Europe’s fraught and polarized debate
about outsiders, immigrants and refugees.
The
man, identified as Mamoudou Gassama, 22, is a migrant from Mali, a
troubled former French colony in northwest Africa, who journeyed through
Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya before making the dangerous Mediterranean
Sea crossing to Italy and arriving in France in September, without
documentation.
On Monday, after his
heroic rescue of the boy, he met with President Emmanuel Macron. Now, he
will get the requisite documentation to live legally in France.
“I
told him that in recognition of his heroic act he would have his papers
in order as quickly as possible,” Mr. Macron said in a statement on Facebook after meeting with Mr. Gassama at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
Mr. Gassama will be one of a lucky few in a country with increasingly tight immigration rules and a generally skeptical attitude toward migrants who are seeking primarily economic benefits.
In
2017, only five people were granted residency papers for “exceptional
talent” or “services rendered to the community,” according to statistics from the French Interior Ministry. In 2016, there were six.
On
Monday, sitting across from Mr. Macron in one of the palace’s many
gilded rooms, Mr. Gassama, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, told
the French president about the rescue. “Bravo,” Mr. Macron said, as the
two men sat before TV cameras.
Mr.
Macron said in his statement that the Paris firefighters were “eager to
welcome” Mr. Gassama into their ranks. He added that he had “invited”
Mr. Gassama to apply for French citizenship, “because France is built on
desire, and Mr. Gassama’s commitment clearly showed that he has that
desire.”
Still, the French president, who defeated the anti-immigration far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the presidential election last year, was quick to clarify that Mr. Gassama was an exception, not the rule.
A sprawling migrant camp near the northern city of Calais was razed in 2016, but hundreds of Afghans, Eritreans and Ethiopians continue to gather there in hopes of reaching Britain. In Paris, makeshift encampments of migrants under bridges and in parks are regularly evacuated by the police, only to grow again.
Mr.
Macron himself has taken a tough approach to immigrants. Parliament has
been discussing a draft law put forward by the French government that
restricts the rights of asylum seekers, a measure that has drawn fierce criticism from human rights groups.
Mr.
Macron has said repeatedly that France could welcome only those with
legitimate grounds for asylum, a point he reiterated in his meeting with
Mr. Gassama, according to Agence France-Presse.
Image
“When
they are in danger, we give asylum, but not for economic reasons,” Mr.
Macron said of immigrants, according to the news agency. “But in your
case, you did something exceptional.”
“An exceptional act does not make a policy,” Mr. Macron later told journalists at the Élysée, the news agency reported.
Some,
including groups that help undocumented migrants, criticized the
government as hypocritical for praising Mr. Gassama while pushing to
deport others like him, calling Mr. Macron’s Élysée invitation a public
relations stunt.
“I admire the bravery of Mamoudou Gassama,” said Raphaël Glucksmann, the managing editor of a left-leaning literary review, in a post
on Facebook. “And I dream of a country where it wouldn’t be necessary
to scale a building to save the life of a child, at the risk of one’s
own life, to be treated like a human being when you are a migrant.”
This
was not the first time in recent years that France celebrated an
immigrant’s heroism. In January 2015, 24-year-old Lassana Bathily was widely praised
for hiding customers in a cold-storage room after a gunman attacked a
kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes, in eastern Paris.
As
France struggled to cope with the terrorist attacks at the supermarket
and at the offices of the satirical news weekly Charlie Hebdo, his
actions provided much needed solace. Mr. Bathily, a Muslim from Mali,
was granted French citizenship later that month, and he currently works
at Paris City Hall.
Mr. Gassama’s meeting with Mr. Macron came after the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, called to thank him for his “act of bravery.”
“He explained to me that he had arrived from Mali a few months ago, dreaming of building his life here,” the mayor said on Twitter.
“I told him that his heroic act is an example to all citizens and that
the city of Paris will obviously be very keen to support him in his
efforts to settle in France.”
Even
Ms. Le Pen’s National Front party offered to support Mr. Gassama’s bid
for residency — but only in return for the expulsion of all the other
migrants living in France without official consent.
The
boy saved by Mr. Gassama was alone in the apartment while his father
went grocery shopping, said François Molins, the Paris prosecutor. The
boy’s mother was not in Paris at the time.
Mr.
Molins told the BFM television news channel that the father had taken a
long time to return home because he had decided to play the smartphone
game Pokémon Go as he was leaving the store.
“He is devastated because he realizes what he did, and the tragic consequences that it could have led to,” Mr. Molins said.
The
father was taken into police custody on Sunday, and an investigation
has been opened for “failure to meet parental obligations.” A conviction
on that charge carries a sentence of up to two years in prison. The
parents have not been identified, as is customary in French criminal
inquiries.
The father has been released pending trial.
As for Mr. Gassama, he told the newspaper Le Parisien that he was with his girlfriend and wanted to go watch the Champions League soccer final Saturday evening when he came across a commotion around 8 p.m.
“I saw all these people shouting, and cars sounding their horns,” he said. “So I crossed the road to go save him.”
“I
felt afraid when I saved the child,” he said, according to French news
reports. “I started to shake, I could hardly stand up. I had to sit
down.”
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