For about ten days, France Info also writes, tens of thousands of people have been sharing a short warning text on Facebook about an attempted abduction of a child, one of the biggest fears in a parent’s life.
“Focus on Giabi (clothing store, ed.), a mother had her baby in a stroller. She looked back for a moment, and the baby was gone. Managers closed the door and searched the store. The boy was in a fitting room with three men of Romanian origin, who were changing clothes and shaving their hair. They were!” is the news.
A post by Le Dauphine News, published Monday, April 10, also mentions a store called Kaibi in Albertville.
Journalist Antoine Kremp from France Info writes that the story is an urban legend, and the principle of this type of legend is to return cyclically in social networks.
The cited source identifies the same story in Kiabi du Nord, Bayonne or Tarbes in recent years. Also Ikea varieties, in Belgium, or Auchan, in Ardèche.
In 2007, this news was posted on a forum: “I heard this news and I sleep hard because it scares me! A woman was browsing the shelves in a department store in Orleans, and when she came back, her daughter was not in the shopping cart! She Panicked, screamed and store security locked all the doors. 30 minutes later, they found the child in a closet, with a gag in his mouth and a shaved head.”
The same message was shared 10 years ago, except the detail with Romanian nationality of the authors was added later. This rumor is reminiscent of another story, which at the time was also known as the “Orleans Rumor” and is very similar to the Giabi story.
It was 1969. The story goes that young women were kidnapped from the fitting rooms of shops run by Jewish merchants to feed the white slave trade network. A completely unsubstantiated story, but here’s what Orleans youth interviewed on TV at the time: “There’s got to be some truth there…no smoke without fire.”
The same kind of comments we are currently reading on Facebook in the gossip of Giabi and the Romanians.
On the evening of April 10, after a post about their store went viral, the store manager wrote on Facebook, “The information circulating about the kidnapped child at the Kyabi Albertville store is false. In fact, it was already published in 2011, with the same spelling and comma errors. Over the years, this crazy rumor has been repeated on social media, each time in a different place. At this time, the Albertville store was a victim…”.
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