Paris hostages sue TV channel for broadcasting hiding place

A group of terrified shoppers who took refuge in a supermarket cold store during a terrorist attack in Paris are suing a French television channel for revealing their hiding place.

The six people, who escaped to safety only after French special forces launched an assault on the Hyper Cacher store, killing gunman Amedy Coulibaly, have accused BFMTV of putting their lives in danger.

In a live broadcast while the siege was continuing, a journalist from the 24-hour channel announced that a woman had taken refuge in the refrigerated storeroom. In fact, six people, including a three-year- old child and a month-old baby, were hiding there.

During the siege, Coulibaly, who had already gunned down four people in the store, watched coverage of the raid on different television channels and had been in contact with BFMTV journalists.

Paris’s prosecutor’s office has opened a preliminary inquiry into the legal action. The charge of endangering the lives of others by a “lack of obligatory care for their security” carries a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a €15,000 fine.

The attack on Hyper Cacher was the climax of three days of terrorist attacks in Paris that started with gunmen Chérif and Saïd Kouachi killing 12 people in an assault on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The following day, their accomplice Coulibaly shot a female police officer before attacking Hyper Cacher in a southeastern district of Paris 24 hours later. As Coulibaly stormed the building on January 9th, a group of shoppers helped by a member of staff fled into the cold store.

During its rolling news programme, BFMTV broadcast a report from one of its journalists, who was among the first on the scene: “There is one person, a woman, who has hidden since the beginning, since the arrival of this man, inside the supermarket, who is hiding in a cold room, who has taken refuge in the cold room and is still there, who is supposed to be inside the cold room, which is at the back of the building.”

Hervé Béroud, the editorial director at BFMTV, has admitted that broadcasting the information was a mistake.

BFMTV has said, however, that its journalist only made the declaration after obtaining guarantees from sources that broadcasting the information would not endanger the hostages' lives. – (Guardian service)