Diners dived to the floor as the bullets rained in
TERRIFIED customers at a restaurant in which five were killed are thought to have survived because they cowered behind a metal menu display board outside.
As gunmen began shooting at La Casa Nostra, some of their bullets ricocheted off the board and protected diners hiding behind it.
Owner Dimitri Mohamadi arrived at the pizzeria just minutes after the bloody rampage ended and saw the bodies of three men and one young woman lying on the street outside.
Mr Mohamadi said: ‘I heard everybody screaming. The tables were broken and there were people still hiding underneath them.
‘One customer was injured, she had got shot in the wrist.
‘Then there was this man – I think he was going to eat in our restaurant – he was having a look at the menu outside when he got shot from behind.
‘He tried to run away but then fell down just in front of the café next to a tree. He was carrying a violin.’
Bullet holes could be seen in the windows of the La Casa Nostra in the Right Bank area of central Paris and across the street at the Bonne Biere café and a launderette.
The gunmen began their assault on La Casa Nostra in Rue de la Fontaine au Roi after killing 15 at two restaurants on nearby Rue Bichat.
Ten minutes after the gunmen opened fire on Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon restaurants, they drove about 500 yards to the pizzeria and slaughtered five diners. Last night Mr Mohamadi told how customers hid themselves behind the restaurant’s bar while an inexperienced 20-yearold waitress saved the lives of others by taking them to the kitchen downstairs.
Looking distraught as he inspected the bullet holes in his restaurant’s walls, and the half-eaten slices of pizza and glasses of wine that had been left behind as the killings began and diners fled for their lives, the restaurateur said: ‘It’s incredible how some people are so lucky.
‘The menu standing there, made out of metal, made some of the bullets ricochet. Those bullets were supposed to kill the people behind it. The bullets were huge and they made extraordinary holes in the walls.’
The waitress, who has only been working at the restaurant for a month, said she helped the woman who was shot in the wrist flee downstairs and tried to stem her bleeding.
Jasmine, who did not want to give her surname, said: ‘She had a hole in her arm.
‘She crawled in my direction and hid by the bar at first, that’s why there’s some blood there.
‘I’ve been crying all night and all day. I’d like to know the name of the girl who died outside because I’m one of the last people to see her alive. She died right in front of me.
‘These people who did this are insane – one of the men they killed was Arabic just like them.’