A journalist from Italian broadcaster Rete 4 has filed a complaint after being detained against her will and physically threatened by a shopkeeper and his son in a halal butcher’s shop in Roubaix. The owner accuses her of filming in the shop without his permission for a report on Islam in France.
While interviewing shopkeepers in halal butcher shops on hidden camera, journalist Costanza Tosi says she was detained against her will and threatened by a butcher and his son in a shop on Rue de Lannoy.
The choice of this street was no coincidence: Rue de Lannoy was already the subject of an episode of the programme ‘Zone interdite’ on the M6 channel in 2022, when it was described as an area of influence for Islamist ‘separatism’.
The journalist says she was forcibly and involuntarily detained in the shop. ‘They kidnapped me,’ she says. According to her statement, she had to hand over her mobile phone in order to be allowed to leave the shop: “I told them they could call the police if they wanted, that I just wanted to leave. After a while, they promised me that I could leave if I gave them my mobile phone with the code, which I did, but then the butcher said he wasn’t going to keep his word and kept preventing me from leaving. They held me for more than an hour. I screamed, I told them it was illegal and they had to let me go. His son showed me his fist and threatened to hit me if I kept talking or left.”
This version is apparently supported by other images recorded in the store. In fact, in the videos from the camera hidden in his bag, one of the two men can clearly be heard making threats: ‘Wallah, I’ll beat you up!’