Six survivors taken hostage on January 9th, 2015 in a kosher supermarket in Paris have filed a civil lawsuit against news agencies covering the attack. They believe that reporters put their lives in danger.

French police are investigating the complaints. The lawsuit is against the BFM TV news site, which carried a live broadcast from the scene and was highlighted separately (by other stations).

(In that attack) Amedie Coulibaly killed four hostages before police stormed the store and shot the assailant.

He was associated with persons who entered the editorial department of the weekly satirical magazine «Charlie Hebdo». He also killed a policewoman the day before taking hostages in the store.

«It cannot go unpunished»

Agency France Press quoted Patrick Klugman, the attorney representing the interests of the surviving hostages. He believes that photography of what went on inside the supermarket, broadcast live «without observance of the most elementary precautions» endangered the lives of the hostages.

Klugman mentioned BFM TV, which broadcast live a group of people, including a three year-old child and a month-old baby, hiding from Coulibaly in a cooler where one of the supermarket employees had concealed them.

«Disclosure of the location where the hostages were hidden was a mistake that cannot go unpunished. Even when it is true information being transmitted, when it is broadcast through the media it must not endanger the people's lives,» said the lawyer in an interview with the French magazine «Paris Match».

It is known that Coulibaly was watching the news on BFM TV and other stations during the attack and subsequent siege.

Multiple stations are accused of disclosing information on how antiterrorist forces were set up around the supermarket, as well as in the suburbs of Paris where they lay siege to a building where the Couashi brothers, who carried out the attack on «Charlie Hebdo», were hiding.

According the BBC correspondent Hugh Schofield in Paris, the lawsuit raises questions on how to manage around the clock media coverage of such attacks.

«Nord-Ost»

In Russia, similar complaints were made against the media covering the October 2002 hostage taking at the musical «Nord-Ost» in the Moscow theatrical and concert complex on Dubrovka.

Sergey Goncharov, president of the Association of Special Force Group Alpha Veterans, later recalled: «While we were working on the roof of the building we were being filmed by the news and shown on TV. But the terrorists had televisions and saw everything.»

Most complaints were against NTV, which had a live broadcast as well as a camera crew allowed into the building, along with physicians, during the siege.

In April 2003, representatives of the major media in Russia signed an «anti-terrorist convention» that established media rules during emergencies.

BBC Russian Service

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