Killers ‘did not give anybody a chance’
PARIS — François Granier, a wine consultant and rock music fan, thought the concert he was attending Friday night had simply taken a particularly raucous turn.
Mai Hua, a fashion blogger and video director who was dining a few blocks away, figured the explosions she heard were just another burst of gang violence.
Erin Allweiss, a publicist from New York who was eating at a restaurant in the same district, hoped the noise came from fireworks.
One by one Friday evening, all the ordinary reflexes, ex- pectations and hopes of urban life fell away as Parisians and visitors to their city confronted nearly simultaneous attacks that spanned from the Stade de France, the national sports stadium on the northern edge of the city, to a shabby- chic district studded with bars and restaurants four miles south.
The dull thuds and sharp cracks that so many thought, or at least hoped, were just the background noises of a night on the town in one of the world’s great, vibrant cities turned out to be the ghastly sounds of the worst terrorist assault on the French capital, even bloodier than the January attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
Little seemed to tie the attacks across at least six sites, except that all 129 victims had been out having fun. But that was very much the point for the Islamic State militant group, which later took responsibility for the carnage and said it had struck France’s symbols of “perversity.”
There were other common elements as well — synchronized attacks, targeting random victims, by well-equipped and apparently trained militants, whom François Molins, the Paris prosecutor, described as working in three coordinated squads.
The attacks began at 9:20 p.m. on a chilly Friday outside the stadium, in the suburb of St.-Denis, where France was playing Germany. French President François Hollande was among those in attendance.
“We heard something that sounded like a detonating bomb as well as shooting,” said Agnès Dupont, who was at the match with her husband and two young children.
Others said they thought youngsters outside the sta- dium were setting off firecrackers. Another blast followed 10 minutes later. The teams kept playing.
The prosecutor, Molins, later said that two of the attackers had detonated suicide bombs near gates to the stadium, which they apparently had tried to enter. A third suicide bomber struck much later, at 9:53 p.m., near a McDonald’s, killing at least one other person.
Across the city, five minutes after the first suicide bomber detonated his explosive outside the stadium, Betty Alves, a 39- year- old Parisian, was ordering Chinese food with a friend at a restaurant in the once working-class and now fashionable 10th Arrondissement. Gunshots rang out.
“It was terrifying,” she recalled. “We saw everyone run down the street. We jumped on the floor and I hid under the table.”
The restaurant closed its metal shutters and everyone hid inside. When they opened the shutters, Alves said, she saw one young woman dead on the street and another man seriously wounded. Her car, a Smart, parked nearby, was riddled with bullet holes. —