French prosecutors on Monday said they had opened an investigation after death threats were issued against a journalist following the broadcast of her report on the rise of radical Islam in France.
Ophelie Meunier has been under police protection since the broadcast on the M6 channel of her report on on radical Islam, notably in the northern town of Roubaix, outside Lille.
The investigation was opened by prosecutors in Nanterre outside Paris.
A Roubaix man, Amine Elbahi, who denounced the rise of extremism in the area on the programme was also placed under police protection.
The programme contained images including a shop in Roubaix that sold dolls with faces removed, with the shopkeeper saying he 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 Eric Zemmour have used strong speech against Islam.
But President Emmanuel Macron has also toughened policies against radical Islamism in the country, which suffered deadly attacks blamed on radicals in late 2020 after a wave of massacres claimed by extremists in 2015.
The issue is 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 across the media spectrum in France for Meunier.
But questions have also been raised over the methods used to produce the televised report.
