Lassana Bathily, age 24, a practising Muslim, is from a small village in northwest Mali. In 2006 he arrived in France, where his father was already living. He enrolled in a vocational school and qualified as a tiler.

Now the supermarket worker is a household name in France, yet he is modest about his recent heroics.

When his workplace in the Vincennes district of Paris was attacked on 9th January, and heavily armed gunman Amedy Coulibaly fatally shot Jewish customers and held others hostage in an act of terrorism, Bathily took six customers into hiding in a basement cold storage room and then slipped out to inform the police.

He said in an interview on French television: “It could be a Christian, an atheist or a Muslim, if I see a bad person killing, it hurts me. I didn’t just do it for the Jews. It’s simply inhuman. You can’t let an innocent person be killed.”

Bathily started out in France illegally. He managed not to be deported in 2009 when his school spoke up for him. Two