The allegedly inebriated soldiers intervened early on Sunday morning to help a woman who was being robbed of her mobile phone in Paris’s Saint-Ambroise metro station, Le Parisien reported.
The off-duty soldiers, aged between 21 and 24, chased the thief to the Boulevard Voltaire where they confronted him. A source close to the investigation said the thief resisted their attempt to retrieve the stolen item.
In the ensuing fight, the migrant had one of his teeth chipped. The three soldiers were arrested together with the robber. “At the public prosecutor’s office, they did not agree on what to do,” a source told the French daily. “Some wanted to give them up to the military. Finally, a prosecutor’s assistant decided to prosecute the soldiers.”
One of the soldiers told the police: “If we have to be in custody, next time, we will not intervene to defend a victim.”
Some 2000 Parisian residents have meanwhile have signed a petition to demand that police action be taken against underage migrant street gangs terrorising their neighbourhoods.
In the heavily-migrant populated Paris areas of La Chapelle, Goutte-d’Or and Barbès especially women are being targeted by Moroccan gangs.
The once prestigious French daily Le Monde was recently caught changing headlines to protect migrants.
Two headlines for the same article in Le Monde, conveyed distinctly different messages. The first read: “The disturbing radicalism of young Muslims” which was then changed to: “The disturbing radicalism of a minority of young people”.
The article itself reported on a survey of 7000 school pupils, aged 14-16.
One quarter of secondary school pupils questioned did not condemn the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan, 80 percent believed religions cannot be mocked, 68 percent distrust the reports on the 2015 attacks, and one third believed that it was “acceptable in certain cases to participate in a violent action to defend your ideas”.
Notably, 26 percent of pupils surveyed were Muslim in what was presented as a “representative poll”.