World prays for Paris
PARIS—France was in a nationwide state of emergency on Saturday after a night of horror in Paris when gunmen sprayed restaurants with bullets, massacred scores of concertgoers and launched suicide attacks near the national stadium, killing at least 129 people and injuring 352.
The Islamic State jihadist group claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying it sent fighters strapped with suicide bombing belts and carrying machine guns to various locations in the French capital.
At least eight militants, all wearing suicide vests, brought unprecedented violence to the streets of the French capital, in the bloodiest attacks in the worst such violence in France’s history.
The attacks were designed to show France would remain a top target for the jihadist group as long as the country continued its current policies, IS said in a statement on Saturday.
Armed with AK-47s and shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is great), four of the group marched into a rock concert at the Bataclan venue in eastern Paris, murdering at least 82 people and taking dozens hostage.
Terrified survivors from the Paris concert hall targeted during Friday’s attacks have described running over bodies and hiding after gunmen who stormed the venue and began executing rock fans with barrages of automatic gunfire.
Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter, was sitting in the balcony with his sister and friends when they heard shots from below about one hour into the concert by US rock band Eagles of Death Metal.
“At first we thought it was part of the show but we quickly understood,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “They didn’t stop firing. There was blood everywhere, corpses everywhere. We heard screaming. Everyone was trying to flee.”
Janaszak and his friends hid in a toilet where they would spend the next two hours waiting for police to storm the building and rescue the survivors.
Around 80 people are believed to have died in the assault.
‘10 horrific minutes’
Another radio reporter described the “10 horrific minutes” when the black-clothed gunmen calmly opened fire.
“It was a bloodbath,” Julien Pearce, a reporter for France’s Europe 1 radio station, told CNN.
“People yelled, screamed and everybody was lying on the floor, and it lasted for 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 horrific minutes where everybody was on the floor covering their heads,” Pearce said.
“We heard so many gunshots and the terrorists were very calm, very determined and they reloaded three or four times,” he said.
“People started to try to escape, to walk on people on the floor and try to find the exits, and I found an exit when the terrorists reloaded their guns. I climbed on the stage and we found an exit,” he said.
Pearce said he took a teenage girl who was bleeding heavily and carried her to a taxi, telling the driver to take her to hospital.
He said he saw the face of one gunman, who was probably 20 to 25 years old.
“We heard people screaming—the hostages particularly—and the threats from the kidnappers shouting ‘Look at me!’” added another survivor, 34-year-old Charles.
He and 20 others fled to a toilet and hid in the ceiling.
A missing fiancée
But others face an agonizing wait to hear from loved ones lost during the chaos.
“My friend Claire was celebrating her best friend’s birthday at the concert. We don’t have any news, the phones are going to answer machine,” said Yvan Pokossy, a 24-year-old party organizer.
“I’m supposed to get engaged to her in three weeks. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again,” Pokossy said.
Marielle Timme hid in a bathroom for close to three hours before being rescued by police.
“What scared us the most was that the last terrorist was killed just near us so we heard all the conversation and gunfire. The bombs, too. We didn’t dare open the door to the police, because we didn’t know if it was them or the terrorists,” she said.
“There’s nothing but the sound of gunfire and carnage running through my head,” said another young woman who hid in a side room with around 25 people.
Blood everywhere
“We had one chance in two of taking a bullet,” she said, shaking.
“They didn’t stop firing. There was blood everywhere, corpses everywhere. Everyone was trying to flee,” said Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who was at the concert by US rock band Eagles of Death Metal.
Hinting at their motives, the gunmen were overheard raging at French President François Hollande and his military interventions in the Syrian civil war against the Islamic State group.
“I clearly heard them say ‘It’s the fault of Hollande, it’s the fault of your President, he should not have intervened in Syria,’” he added.
France has joined US-led airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq for over a year and in September began bombing jihadists in Syria.
Jihadists suspected
Suspicion immediately fell on Islamic State, or al-Qaida and its affiliates, as the likely perpetrators of the coordinated assault that left at least 128 people dead and 300 injured across six locations.
Investigators said at least eight attackers were dead by the end of Friday night’s violence.
More than 500 French fighters are thought to be with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, according to official figures, while 250 have returned and some 750 expressed a desire to go.
In January, 17 people were killed in Paris in attacks that targeted satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket.
Another disaster was narrowly averted in August when a gunman was overpowered on a packed high-speed train in northern France.
No arrests had been made by early Saturday morning and it was unclear if any gunmen were still on the loose.
Police were screening hours of video surveillance at the multiple locations.
As a precaution, all sports events were canceled on Saturday in Paris, while access to public facilities such as museums and swimming pools was restricted.
Security had begun to be stepped up ahead of key UN climate talks to be held just outside the French capital from Nov. 30, with border checks restored from Friday.
‘Act of war’
“Terrorist attacks of an unprecedented level are under way across the Paris region,” Hollande said in an emotional televised message on Friday night in which he declared a nationwide state of emergency.
“It’s a horror,” he added.
Hollande said the attacks in Paris were “an act of war” organized from abroad by Islamic State with internal help.
“Faced with war, the country must take appropriate action,” Hollande said, without saying what that meant.
Islamic State earlier on Saturday distributed an undated video threatening to attack France if bombings of its fighters continued.
Official mourning 3 days
Hollande said he would address parliament on Monday in an extraordinary meeting and the country would observe three days of official mourning for the victims of the attacks.
The President himself was caught up in the carnage and had to be hastily evacuated from the national Stade de France stadium when suicide bombers struck outside during a friendly football match between France and Germany.
At first, very few of the crowd appeared to be aware of the significance of what was happening despite the appearance of helicopters low in the sky. The match continued as other attacks began around the capital.
Three loud explosions were heard outside the stadium during the first half of the football match.
At least four people died outside the glittering venue that staged the 1998 World Cup final with several others seriously hurt.
One of the explosions was near a McDonald’s restaurant on the fringes of the stadium.
At least one of the two explosions on Rue Jules-Rimet was a suicide bomb attack.
Bewildered fans
In the stadium, the two sides played to the end. Afterward, bewildered fans poured onto the pitch while waiting for all the exits to be declared secure. The stadium emptied in a relatively calms atmosphere.
The worst of the bloodshed occurred at the Bataclan concert hall in the trendy 11th arrondissement, or district, where more than 1,500 rock fans were at a sellout show for the American Eagles of Death Metal band.
Four gunmen wearing suicide vests and armed with AK-47s stormed the venue and began spraying the crowd with bullets.
As screams rang out and survivors ran over the injured or dead to make their ways to the exits or places to hide, the militants took hostages and then began executing them.
Suicides
“We heard people screaming—the hostages particularly—and the threats from the kidnappers,” added another survivor, 34-year-old Charles.
Along with around 20 others, he fled to a toilet where he pushed through the ceiling and hid in the crawl space.
Three of the militants blew up their explosive vests as elite antiterror police raided the venue around 12:30 a.m. while a fourth was shot dead.
Another attacker blew himself up in nearby Boulevard Voltaire, as the streets were filled with the sound of police sirens and convoys of ambulances shipping hundreds of injured to hospital.
At least 82 people were killed in the attack on the concert hall.
Several restaurants near the concert hall were also targeted, including a popular Cambodian eatery in the trendy Canal St. Martin area, whose bars and restaurants heave with the young and affluent on a typical Friday night. At least 12 people were killed in Friday night’s attack.
On Rue de Charonne, 18 people were killed, with one witness saying a Japanese restaurant and nearby cafe were the main targets.
“There was blood everywhere,” the witness said.
Another man said he heard shots ring out, in sharp bursts, for two or three minutes.
“I saw several bloodied bodies on the ground. I don’t know if they were dead,” he said.
Military reinforcement
An extra 1,500 soldiers were mobilized to reinforce police in Paris, Hollande’s office said, with the city still recovering from the psychological wounds inflicted by the Charlie Hebdo attack.
READ: France vows to punish IS for Paris attacks that killed 127
French media reacted with horror but determination to the scenes of devastation.
“This time it’s war,” declared the Le Parisien daily.
“War in central Paris,” splashed center-right daily Le Figaro.
Many papers called for unity in the country still reeling from the Charlie Hebdo attack that killed 17 people.
“In the name of the true martyrs of yesterday, the innocent victims and in the name of the Republic, France will be able to stay united and stand together,” Le Parisien said.
‘Terrorist barbarism’
The “terrorist barbarism” has crossed a “historic line,” said the head of the left-leaning Liberation daily, calling for France to stay resolute.
“It is impossible not to link these bloody events with the battles raging in the Middle East. France is playing its part there. It must continue to do so without blinking,” Laurent Joffrin in an editorial.
Other reactions were a mix of fear and defiance.
Concertgoer Charles, who spoke to AFP at the Bataclan, said he would refuse to be cowed by the terror he had experienced.
“Life goes on. We won’t give in to fear. Fuck them!” he said. “I’m going to a concert on Tuesday. Keep rocking!” Reports from AFP
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