In packed concert hall, they shot with AK47s, reloaded – then fired again
Bataclan Concert Hall 8.30pm 89 dead 100+ injured
past La Belle Equipe on Rue de Charonne, when he heard shots behind him. Turning, he saw two gunmen shower the café with ‘around 100 bullets’. He was just 30 yards away and scrambled for cover. This time, the death toll was 19.
‘My colleague and I started heading back towards the restaurant. It was mayhem. We wanted to help. We’d eaten at this café two days ago. The staff were so friendly.
‘There were injured people and people who were obviously dead. There was a whole pile of bodies on the left-hand side at the front – I counted seven – and four bodies on the right hand side.
Half a mile away, at 8.43pm, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire on the Boulevard Voltaire, killing himself and wounding more than a dozen.
At that point, it had been just 26 minutes since the carnage began at the Stade de France.
If it had all ended there it would still have been one of the worst terrorist attacks in modern French history. But there was to be an appalling denouement – the barbaric attack on the nearby Bataclan theatre, which is one of the city’s most popular music venues.
The 150-year-old music hall was sold out for a concert by the Californian group Eagles Of Death Metal, who had been on stage for an hour when four young men burst into the auditorium – AK-47s blazing – at 8.49pm. Eighty-nine people would die there. The men ordered the 1,000-strong audience to lie on the floor. One shouted in French: ‘What you are doing in Syria, you are going to pay for it now.’ Another cried: ‘This is for Syria.’
Then, aiming their weapons, they issued short bursts of fire, killing two or three people at a time.
Survivors would speak later of the unspeakable terror, of people crawling on top of each other, covering their heads, whispering prayers. For ten minutes, the gunmen slowly picked off their victims as they lay face-down, deliberately pausing for a minute every so often, raising the already appalling sense of dread.
‘They shot, recharged their guns, and shot again,’ said one man.
Some of the spectators managed to flee from back exits, but for minutes the gunmen shot unimpeded.
In footage that emerged later, dozens of people are seen stepping over injured or dead bodies to escape gunmen. Others hang desperately from first and second-floor windows as they try to evade death from the terrorists inside.
Outside, one man, who appears to have been shot in the leg, limps desperately as he tries to find cover.
And just yards down the street, two badly injured victims are seen being dragged away by their friends, leaving a trail of blood in the street.
Back in the theatre, French fashion designer Emile Thoorens had gone to the lavatory two minutes before the shooting started.
‘When I got in, I was in the bathroom and I start hearing noises which I thought were firecrackers at first. It was repeated, repeated, repeated and I realised it was shooting. People started opening doors and shouting.
‘I decided, if I stay here they’re going to find me. I just ran out and found an exit door.
‘I went out of an exit and I ran and ran and ran. There were people crying on the floor, injured everywhere.
‘I tried to contact my friends inside. I came back towards the entrance and the shooting started again from outside. I don’t know if they were shooting people trying to get out but they were still shooting and shooting.’
Elsewhere, during the scramble to survive, people climbed into the upper boxes of the hall, or cowered under seats. The musicians quickly fled the stage.
‘It was a scene of carnage,’ said Julien Pearce, a radio reporter. ‘It lasted for ten minutes, ten horrific minutes when everybody was on the floor covering their heads and we heard so many gunshots, and the terrorists were very calm, very determined, and they reloaded their weapons three or four times.’
Then the gunmen began rounding up survivors, holding them as hostages as dozens of police officers massed outside. For more than an hour-and-a-half, a tense stand-off prevailed, with more and more police arriving at the scene.
Schoolgirl Laura Somaini, 16, watching TV across the street in her apartment with her father Antonio, described what happened next.
She said around 30 armed police stormed the theatre after an explosion. There were a few quick rounds of gunfire, more explosions, and then it was over.
The siege came to an end with three attackers blowing themselves up, and one being shot dead by the police. After the assault, hostages streamed out of the hall, some with their hands on their heads.
Marielle Timme, 32, a local coun- cillor in Lens, northern France, who also hid in the ladies’ toilet, said: ‘When we came out we had to get by the body of one of the assailants which was lying on the ground covered in blood. We saw dozens and dozens of bodies strewn on the floor. I will never be able to forget that horrific sight.’