French President Emmanuel Macron has granted French citizenship to a Malian migrant hailed as a hero after he climbed a building to rescue a child dangling from a balcony.
Ro Aram reports.
Over the weekend, 22-year-old Mamoudou Gassama was cheered by onlookers as he climbed four floors in seconds to save the four-year-old boy.
The act earned him the title "Spider-Man of the 18th arrondissement."
On Monday, he was invited to the Elysee Palace to meet President Macron, who gave him a medal for his bravery and told him he would be immediately naturalized as a French citizen, and given a job with the Paris firefighters.
"I met this morning a young hero who won fame during the weekend. He told me what he did, what a lot of us saw and we decided not only to give him papers to legalise his stay, but to offer him citizenship and a job as a firefighter to practice every day the same heroism, because it's the same spirit that our firefighters have every day…"
Gassama, who was in the area to watch a football match, described what went through his mind at the time.
"I saw a boy who fell from the fifth floor. I think I like children a lot, I don't want for something bad to happen to them in front of me, it would have broken my heart. I ran, I thought of ways to rescue him. Thank God, I climbed up to the fifth floor and I saved him."
Meanwhile, the toddler has been placed in care while his father is being investigated for neglect.
The boy's mother is believed to not have been in Paris at the time.
It remains unclear how the child ended up hanging from the balcony.
Ro Aram, Arirang News.
