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PARIS: A man who saved several people including children and babies from a fire last week in Paris while balancing on a narrow ledge will be decorated for his courage.

Fousseynou Cissé is making headlines in France after risking his life to help those trapped in a top-floor apartment located in a northern district of Paris.

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said on Monday that he would be awarding Cissé a medal “in recognition of his courage and dedication.”

“This medal recognizes republican courage that commands admiration,” Nunez said.

According to local media, two families were trapped by the fire on Saturday and took refuge in a flat on the top floor. When Cissé realized there was a fire, he decided to leave the building to protect himself, his wife and child.

“As I was leaving, (my neighbor) called me over and told me that there were people trapped upstairs,” he told France Info.

Cissé went to the neighboring apartment, climbed out of the window, and stood on a railing linking the two apartments, 20 meters (65 feet) from the void, in order to evacuate the victims trapped by the toxic fumes.

Cissé then evacuated children who were handed over through a window by their mothers, passing them to the neighbor in an adjacent apartment. He helped the children over the ledge before helping the two mothers reach safety.

“It wasn’t calculated; it was instinct: ‘We’ve got to go’. So I jumped in to help,” he said.

In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron lauded as a hero a migrant from Mali who scaled an apartment building to save a child dangling from a balcony, and rewarded the young man’s bravery with an offer of French citizenship and a job as a firefighter.

The 39-year-old Cissé reportedly works as a receptionist in secondary schools. He does not have French citizenship but holds a residence permit.

“If you’re not a French national, you won’t get hired,” he said. Asked by France Info what he might wish for as a reward after his heroic gesture, he replied that he hoped “it might loosen things up, and that things would settle down" so that he could be hired by the Paris town hall.

NEW DELHI: Indian villagers beat a family of five to death and dumped their corpses in a lake accusing them of “practicing witchcraft” after the death of a boy, police said Tuesday.
Three people have been arrested and have confessed to the crime, police in the northern state of Bihar said in a statement.
Three women — including a 75-year-old — were among those murdered.
The main accused believed that his son’s recent death was caused by one of those killed, and blamed “him and his family of practicing witchcraft,” the statement said.
“After beating the victims to death, the perpetrators loaded the bodies onto a tractor and dumped them in a pond,” police said.
The murderers and victims all belonged to India’s Oraon tribe in Bihar, India’s poorest state and a mainly Hindu region of at least 130 million people.
Despite campaigns against superstition, belief in witchcraft remains widespread in rural areas across India, especially in isolated tribal communities.
Some states, including Bihar, have introduced laws to try to curb crimes against people accused of witchcraft and superstition.
Women have often been branded witches and targeted, but the killing of the family of five stands out as a particularly heinous recent example.
More than 1,500 people — the overwhelming majority of them women — were killed in India on suspicion of witchcraft between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
Some believe in the occult, but attackers also sometimes have other motives including usurping their rights over land and property.