- GRAPHIC CONTENT: Harrowing photographs shows the aftermath inside the Bataclan theatre as full horrors emerge
- Many among the young crowd initially thought the gunshots and ISIS gunmen were part of a pyrotechnical prank
- Jihadis' operation was brutal with one gunman looking out for people moving and others shooting those still alive
- 89 rock fans never made it out of the French hall and hundreds more are in hospital having suffered terrible wounds
- See our full coverage of the ISIS terrorist attacks at www.dailymail.co.uk/isis
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An
hour into the rock concert, the atmosphere was frenetic. The band had
just finished playing a number called Save A Prayer and — having told
their raucous Parisian fans they loved them — they were launching into
another favourite, Kiss The Devil.
How
sickeningly ironic these song titles seem now. As the strobe lights
flashed, silhouetting the Eagles of Death Metal drummer Julian Dorio
raising his sticks and white-bearded guitarist Dave Catching thrashing
out a riff, a volley of cracks rang out — so loud they cut right through
the thrumming heavy metal music.
Many
among the hip young crowd whooped and cheered, thinking it must be some
zany pyrotechnical prank. Even when three men burst through the doors
brandishing semi-automatic weapons and bristling with magazines of
ammunition, some thought they were part of the spectacle.
Julian
Dorio instinctively knew better. Though partially blinded by the stage
lights, he cowered behind his drum kit. Two other band members also
hurled themselves to the floor. Yet the guitarist stood stock still
beside his microphone, as if paralysed by the enormity of the scene
unfolding below him.
Scroll down for video
The band had just finished playing a
number called Save A Prayer and — having told their raucous Parisian
fans they loved them — they were launching into another favourite, Kiss
The Devil, when the ISIS gunmen began their massacre. Above, the
Bataclan concert hall after the attack
CUT DOWN WITHOUT A SECOND THOUGHT
It
was around 9.40pm, at one of the coolest venues in Paris, the Bataclan
Concert Hall, just off the Place de la Republique; a room packed with
chic Left Bank intellectuals and a good many Britons clamouring to see
the cult Californian band on their European tour. But that packed hall
was about to become a Dante-esque vision of hell.
A
place where the slightest sound or movement — the nervous twitch of a
limb, a whispered word of prayer — could fix some innocent young person
in a gunman’s merciless sights. A place where even disabled rock fans,
sitting helplessly in their wheelchairs, were cut down without a second
thought.
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Dressed
in black, their faces unmasked, the terrorists had screeched up in a
black car, and sprayed the adjacent cafe with bullets before bursting
into the concert hall.
Among
the first to die were those standing closest to the front doors and
drinking at the bar. Within seconds, the cracks grew louder and more
sustained echoing around the hall with hysterical squeals, and
bullet-ridden people began collapsing like dominoes.
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The hall is quite small, and many of
the 1,500 fans were huddled together so tightly that those who were shot
didn’t hit the ground at first. Instead, they fell, writhing, against
those beside them, drenching them in blood
129 people died
in the horrifying attacks, which French authorities believe were carried
out by at least two terrorists who came from Syria through Greece
Video shows the moment the gunfire erupts inside the theatre and the band's drummer dives down behind his drum kit for cover
French fire officer helped an injured man away from the scene of the attack at the Bataclan concert in Paris on Friday night
Victims lay on the pavement outside La Bell Equipe restaurant on Friday evening following the unprecedented attacks
A woman is evacuated from the scene of the massacre, where witnesses said gunmen threatened to kill anyone who moved
A member of the French special forces
evacuates people, including one man with an injury to his head, from
near the Bataclan theatre on Friday night following the shootings
However,
the hall is quite small, and many of the 1,500 fans were huddled
together so tightly that those who were shot didn’t hit the ground at
first. Instead, they fell, writhing, against those beside them,
drenching them in blood.
‘Allahu
Akbar!’ the terrorists bellowed: a cry that is supposed to glorify the
Almighty but has become a mantra for murder. ‘This is for Syria!’
shouted one in flawless French. ‘It’s Hollande’s fault.’ Now it was
horribly clear who these men were and what they had come for.
As
the militarily organised terrorists took up their positions — one
standing sentry in the pillared balcony, others remaining below to pick
out the first targets (illuminated by the bright overhead lights) —
people fell to the floor.
Some barely dared to breath; others reached for their phones to whisper and tap out desperate messages to loved ones.
Eighty-nine
rock fans never made it out of that hall, and hundreds more suffered
terrible wounds, some picked off as they ran down the alley.
OVER TWO HOURS OF SLAUGHTER
Among
the victims was Nick Alexander, 36, a gentle, bearded man from
Colchester, much loved on the heavy metal rock circuit, who made his
living selling posters and T-shirts. He was there with his American
former girlfriend, Helen Wilson, who was shot in both thighs, but lived.
‘It was mayhem,’ she said from her hospital bed.
‘When anyone started running they would shoot them, so we got down on the floor. They machine-gunned everybody.’
The
random slaughter was to go on intermittently for two hours and 40
minutes. Helen described how the killers chillingly dispatched disabled
fans, who were seated in a special area with the best view of the stage.
‘They went into the back room where there were people in wheelchairs
and they just started shooting them,’ she said.
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Dead and wounded people lie on the
pavement outside the Cafe Bonne Biere in Paris following a series of
coordinated attacks on Friday
At least eight
militants, all wearing suicide vests, brought unprecedented violence to
the streets of the French capital in the bloodiest attack in Europe
since the Madrid train bombings in 2004
The gunmen burst into the concert hall
shouting 'Allahu Akbar', or 'God is great'. Pictured: A victim under a
blanket outside the theatre after the massacre
Supporters of both France and Germany
were held in the stadium until they could be safely evacuated. Last
night, French Football Federation president Noel Le Great admitted he
was concerned about safety at next summer’s month-long European
Championships
PARIS MASSACRE: WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT THE DEADLIEST TERROR ATTACK TO HIT EUROPE IN A DECADE
At
least 129 people are dead, and another 352 injured, after three teams
of jihadis struck the Stade de France football stadium, a handful of
bars and cafes, and then finally the Bataclan concert hall.
FIRST TWO ATTACKS: STADE DE FRANCE
- The attacks began at 8.17pm GMT at the Stade de France where the French football team was hosting Germany in an international friendly.
- The game was being watched by 80,000 spectators, among them was President Francois Hollande who had to be evacuated from the stadium.
- The first explosion, a suicide bombing, was at an entrance to the stadium. A suicide bomber approached the gate with a match ticket when he was frisked by a security guard who turned him away.
- He backed away from the gate and detonated his vest at about 8.20pm GMT near Gate D of the stadium, killing one other person. A passport with the name Ahmed Almuhamed, 25, from Syria, was allegedly found nearby.
- A second suicide bomber, Bilal Hadfi, 20, blew himself up near Gate H several minutes later. No one else was reported killed. Hadfi is said to have fought with ISIS in Syria.
THIRD ATTACK: LE PETIT CAMBODGE AND LE CARILLON BAR
- At 8.25pm GMT a separate team of gunmen arrived in a Black Seat and attacked diners at popular Cambodian restaurant Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon bar in the trendy Canal Saint-Martin area of eastern Paris, killing 15.
Timeline of events: Eight bombers
carried out the devastating attacks on Friday night, leaving 129 people
dead and another 352 injured
FOURTH ATTACK: LA CASA NOSTRA PIZZERIA AND LA BELLE EQUIPE BAR
- The same unit then drove about 500 yards to La Casa Nostra pizzeria and opened fire on diners on the terrace of the restaurant, killing at least five people.
- From there, the militants drove around a mile south-east – apparently past the area of the Bataclan concert venue – to launch another attack, this time on La Belle Equipe bar in Rue de Charonne. At least 19 people died after the terrace was sprayed with bullets at 8.38pm GMT. The attackers then drove off.
FIFTH ATTACK: CAFÉ ‘COMPTOIR VOLTAIRE’
- Five minutes later, Ibrahim Abdeslam, 31, set off a suicide vest outside the outside cafe 'Comptoir Voltaire' on the Boulevard Voltaire and close to the Bataclan theatre. He hired a black Seat car used in the attack.
SIXTH ATTACK: BATACLAN MUSIC HALL
- At 8.49pm GMT, the third group (believed to be three men and a woman) armed with AK-47s stormed the Bataclan music hall and began shooting members of the crowd. Survivors claim three blew themselves up and a fourth person was shot dead by police before they could detonate their bomb.
SEVENTH ATTACK: NEAR STADE DE FRANCE
- At around 8.50pm GMT a third blast took place near the Stade de France, this time by a McDonald’s restaurant on the fringes of the stadium. The boom caused terror among spectators who had already been attempting to flee the stadium following the first two explosions. The attacker who detonated his suicide vest was identified as a 20-year-old French man living in Belgium.
Tearful members of the public view flowers and tributes on the pavement near the scene of the concert hall massacre on Friday
AFTERMATH:
- On Saturday morning, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks across Paris, saying 'eight brothers wearing explosive belts and carrying assault rifles' conducted a 'blessed attack on... Crusader France'.
- On Saturday afternoon, three people travelling in a grey VW Polo were arrested at the French/Belgian border when police traced the car after it was sighted outside the Bataclan theatre at the time of the attacks.
- One of the Stade de France suspects was found carrying a Syrian passport under the name Ahmed Almuhamed who travelled to France as a migrant through Greece on October 3. Ferry tickets reveal he travelled with another man named as Mohammed Almuhamed.
- However, the French minister of justice Christiane Taubira said on Sunday that the passport under the name Ahmed Almuhamed was a fake.
- Omar Ismaël Mostefai, 29, from Courcouronnes, Paris was also named as a Bataclan suicide bomber. The petty criminal and father-of-one was known to police as a radical and had travelled to Algeria and Syria. He was identified by the fingerprint on a severed digit found after he detonated his suicide belt.
- Mostefai is believed to have been radicalised by a Belgian hate preacher of Moroccan descent claimed to have regularly preached at his mosque in South West France. His father, a brother and other family members have been held and are being questioned.
- The black Seat Leon used by the terrorists who murdered diners outside the Casa Nostra pizza restaurant and the La Belle Équipe cafe was found abandoned 20 minutes away in Montreuil with a cache of weapons inside.
- Seven people were detained in Belgium linked to the atrocities - three at the border and four in Brussels. Five are from the Molenbeek area of Brussels known as a 'den of terrorists'.
- Iraqi spies warned the West of an ISIS suicide bomber threat the day before the Paris atrocities, it was revealed on Sunday, as more details of major intelligence failures began to emerge. The US-led coalition in Syria was apparently told by Iraqi security sources that 24 extremists were involved in the terror operation planned in the ISIS capital Raqqa and it would involve 19 attackers including five others including bombmakers and planners. No detail was given of when or where an attack might take place.
- It has also emerged that Turkey's authorities foiled a plot to stage a 'Jihadi John revenge attack' in Istanbul - involving a high-profile British jihadist - on the same day as the deadly massacre in Paris.
- From as far back as August, France's authorities possessed information that militants were said to be planning attacks on French concert halls after a tip-off was received from a 30-year-old man who was detained on his way back from Syria.
- On Sunday night there were 42 people still said to be in intensive care in hospital following Friday's terrorist attacks.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
- French police are still hunting for three gunmen on the run, including Brussels-born Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, and an ISIS bombmaker likely to have made the suicide vests.
- An international arrest warrant has been issued for Abdeslam, 26, who is accused of renting a Volkswagen Polo used by the suicide bombers. He is one of three brothers believed to be at the heart of the eight-strong ISIS cell.
- It emerged on Sunday night that police found Abdeslam near the Belgian border early Saturday but let him go after he showed them his ID card. Officers pulled over the car being driven by Abdelslam on Saturday morning on the A2 motorway between Paris and Brussels. Two other men were also in the Seat car. At the time, officers in Paris knew that Abdeslam had rented the car used by the killers which had been abandoned near the theatre but the information had not been transmitted to those responsible for conducting the border checks.
- His brother Ibrahim, 31, blew himself up in a solo attack outside cafe Comptoir Voltaire after renting a black Seat found abandoned today filled with AK-47s and ammunition. A third sibling, named as Mohamed Abdeslam, has been arrested in the Belgian capital.
- On Sunday evening the French defence ministry announced that the country's warplanes had bombed Islamic State's stronghold in Syria's Raqa, destroying a command post and a training camp, the defence ministry said. Ten fighter jets were involved, dropping 20 bombs.
Among
the others killed was a cousin of the French international footballer
Lassana Diarra, who was playing for his country against Germany, just a
few miles north of the hall at the Stade de France, the target of
another of the attacks.
It
was a night of so many bleak coincidences. And there are still many
unanswered questions. What became of Gilles Leclerc, for example, a
bearded young man who posted a selfie with his girlfriend, Marianne
Labanane, on Instagram — raising their plastic beer glasses and gazing
enigmatically into the camera — as they waited for the concert to start?
Marianne,
we know, survived, for yesterday she received help at a victims’
support centre set up in a nearby town hall. But last night, as his
anguished parents appealed for information about him on Facebook, Gilles
was still ‘missing’.
NO CHANCE TO BE A HERO
Two
Scottish friends at the concert as a joint birthday celebration managed
to sneak down into the cellar below the hall and hide there with some
Italian men, listening to the terrible events unfolding above them.
John Leader, an expat Australian, had taken his 12-year-old son Oscar to see his favourite band.
He describes hearing the ‘firecracker’ sound, then feeling the ‘whistle’ of a bullet go past his ear.
‘One
of the gunmen was surveilling the crowd while the other was shooting on
it,’ he said. ‘People in their sights had no chance of surviving. There
was no chance of being a hero because these guys were very organised.’
At one point in the chaos, he said, he became separated from his son and
began shouting for him frantically, oblivious to the risk of drawing
attention to himself.
Police, scrambled to the Bataclan following reports the gunmen had taken hundreds hostage, take aim at the jihadis
They were forced to take cover and
sprint down the street after the terrorists replied with a volley of
fire that ricochets off a car
Plain-clothed officers wait for the
order to go in and stop the terrorists on Friday night. Nearly 90 people
were killed at the concert hall
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Mercifully,
they were reunited; though someone beside Oscar was shot dead and,
speaking to CNN, the young boy recalled his distress at being forced to
lay next to a corpse — the first he has ever seen in his tender years.
It
offered a glimpse of what it must have been like to be in that concert
hall, as the seconds and minutes went by and the assassins went about
their evil work.
Yet
perhaps the most graphic and chilling first-hand description comes from
a nameless survivor who penned his account online, a few hours after
escaping.
Having
thrown himself to the floor as the shooting began, he describes
people’s agony as they lay — for almost three hours, let us not forget —
‘on top of each other in contrived, painful positions, face on the
ground, head resting on whatever, a leg for example, all on top of a
bloodbath.’ Cramped in this grotesque position, he then played out the
‘worst game I have ever played’ — silently holding his breath and
remaining motionless and hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be the
next one to die.
Praying he could hold out until help came.
‘PLEASE SHOOT THEM... NOT ME’
Periodically, he says, the awful silence was punctuated by gunfire — not in time, with no logic.
‘Nothing.
Just gunfire now and again. And we asked ourselves if the next bullet
was for us . . . waiting for the police to arrive without any notion of
time (I couldn’t get to my phone), feeling people getting up, to
suddenly getting shot down. Again . . . and again.’
People were so closely entwined that it was as if they were ‘inter-woven together’.
When
someone began to cry, others begged them to hush. ‘Every muscle was
numb,’ and it was impossible even to raise one’s head and see what was
happening elsewhere in the hall without drawing the gunmen’s attention.
‘So we waited, as if playing lottery with the terrorists,’ the survivor
went on. ‘You have these awful thoughts, such as: “I beg, please not me .
. . aim at the other side of the hall.”
‘These thoughts are interrupted by gunfire.’
At
one point he felt the jolt of a huge explosion — the sound of a grenade
being hurled into the pit near the stage, someone later told him. As
the noise subsided, people began panicking and writhing, and phones
began ringing, bringing more shots and heightening the sense of fear.
Belgian police arrested three suspects
as they tried to cross the border from France on Friday night. Above,
police officers investigate the scene in the streets of Molenbeek,
Brussels
Authorities in Belgium made several arrests in the Brussels area of Molenbeek in a series of raids on Saturday morning
French police conduct a control at the French-German border in Strasbourg, France, the morning after a series of deadly attacks
Finally, at about 12.30am, someone beside him whispered the words he thought he would never live to hear: ‘The police are here.’
For
a few minutes the shooting abated and nothing seemed to be happening.
But the hall was surrounded by armed police and the order had been given
to storm the building.
The
terrorists emerged from the hall and a fierce gun battle raged with
bullets ricocheting off parked cars. By some reports the shooting lasted
half an hour, but by 1am it was over.
‘It
was a relief that I cannot describe,’ the survivor recalls. ‘People
just looked at each other, shaking. I collapsed in a torrent of tears,
shaking all over.’
Fearing
some of the terrorists might have hidden themselves among the crowd,
the survivors were searched and ordered to leave the building with their
hands on their heads. But the police needn’t have worried — the gunmen,
cowards to the last, had taken the quick way out and blown themselves
to smithereens.
So,
the longest, bloodiest night was over. If we still can’t begin to
imagine how it must have been for those rock fans enjoying their Friday
night out, one grisly photograph, taken inside the concert hall soon
after the massacre, tells us all we need know.
It shows the debris and the body parts, and the floor smeared with huge streaks of congealed blood.
‘Who’ll love the Devil? Who’ll sing his song?’
By
the grimmest of ironies, those are the lyrics of the song that the
Eagles of Death Metal were playing when the first bullets struck. Now we
know the answer.
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