Bombay Durpun - French prosecutors probe death threats against TV reporter

Ophelie Meunier, whose report was broadcast on the M6 channel, has been under police protection since the broadcast of her report on the M6 channel on radical Islam, notably in the northern town of Roubaix, outside Lille.

The probe was opened by prosecutors in Nanterre outside Paris.

A local Roubaix man, Amine Elbahi, who denounced the rise of radical Islam in the area in the programme was also placed under police protection.

The programme contained images including a shop in Roubaix which sold dolls with faces removed, with the shopkeeper saying was not allowed to show the image of a face in Islam.

It also showed a private school in Marseille where veiled girls were separated from boys.

The controversy over the report has fed into the French presidential election campaign where far-right candidates such as Marine Le Pen and above all Eric Zemmour have adopted strident rhetoric against Islam.

But President Emmanuel Macron has also toughened policies against radical Islamism in the country, which saw a spate of deadly attacks blamed on Islamist radicals in late 2020 following a wave of massacres claimed by jihadists in 2015.

The issue is hugely explosive in the country whose secularism is a cornerstone of its identity but which also has a large Muslim minority.

There has been a wave of support from left to right across the media spectrum in France for Meunier. However questions have also been raised over the methods used to create the televised report,

P.Mueller--BD