Friday evening in Paris and the city was coming to life. People filled outdoor cafes, sipping café au lait or wine. Restaurants were jammed, bars were noisy and fun. More than 80,000 people, including President Francois Hollande, jammed into the Stade de France just north of the city, most of them cheering for France to thump Germany in a friendly soccer match. Then, in the period of a half-hour, everything changed.
Explosion at Stade de France
At 9:20 p.m., an explosion boomed through the Stade de France. A suicide bomber had blown himself up outside, but witnesses said most people in the crowd assumed it was fireworks, and the game continued.
“At first nobody thought of terrorism,” Rainer Ohler, head of communications for Airbus, told Reuters. “It was only when President Hollande left and people started getting phone messages that we realized what was going on.”
Ohler and Airbus CEO Tom Enders were at the game with about 1,000 emergency workers and volunteers who had responded to the March crash of a Germanwings flight in the Alps. Lufthansa, which owns Germanwings, had brought the workers to the game as a reward.
Shooting begins at Le Carillon, Le Petit Cambodge
Moments after the first bomb blast, at 9:25 p.m., a man stepped out of a car in front of Le Carillon, a modest cafe-bar with a dirty maroon awning in the city center, and started shooting.
“People dropped to the ground. We put a table over our heads to protect us,” said Ben Grant, who was with his wife at the back of the bar, according to the BBC.
The shooter then reportedly walked across the street and opened fire at a restaurant called Le Petit Cambodge, or Little Cambodia.
Stefano, a 30-year-old Brazilian citizen working in Paris as an artist, and seven of his Brazilian friends were having dinner on the terrace of Le Petit Cambodge when the shooting started, according to his wife, Laurine Durand.
“The next thing he saw was people panicking and screaming,” said Durand, 29. “He was next to the door entrance, so he rushed back inside.” Stefano declined to be interviewed and asked that his last name not be used for security reasons.
Stefano saw his friend, Gabriel, lying on the sidewalk covered in blood, so he grabbed him and pulled him inside the restaurant, Laurine said.
“At that moment, he thought they were all going to die,” she said.
Gabriel had been shot twice in the leg and once in the back, and another friend, Camilia, was shot in the hand and in the breast, she said.
A woman in her 20s, who declined to identify herself, said she had been in Le Petit Cambodge during the shooting. On Saturday, she sat crying on the sidewalk near the restaurant, where she left a note that said: “Your lives were stolen and mine was spared. I will forever grieve you.”
News reports said 14 people were killed in the shootings at Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge.
More gunfire; second explosion at the stadium
Moments after those attacks, a few streets away on Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, a man with an assault weapon reportedly opened fire at a pizza restaurant called Casa Nostra.
At 9:30, a second explosion rang out at the stadium — and it still didn’t occur to the crowd that anything was amiss.
At about 9:38, witnesses told the BBC, two men got out of a car and opened fire at La Belle Equipe, a popular eatery in Paris’s 11th district, an area filled with restaurants and bars.
According to a review in TimeOut Paris magazine, La Belle Equipe, “somewhere between a classic restaurant and a trendy nightspot,” opened in late 2014.
The gunfire “lasted at least three minutes,” one witness said. “Then they got back in their car.”
News reports said 18 people were killed.
Suicide bomber on Boulevard Voltaire
Less than five minutes later, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside Cafe Comptoir Voltaire, a neighborhood restaurant on Boulevard Voltaire, with a red awning advertising “Cuisine Traditionnelle.”
A video posted online later showed investigators in white suits photographing and examining the tattered remnants of a suicide vest. Outside, where people had been enjoying their evening in typical Parisian red-and-white chairs and small round tables, the video showed remnants of other clothing — it wasn’t clear whether it belonged to patrons or the bomber.
It was unclear how many people were killed or injured there.
Explosion at the Bataclan
At 9:49, police had their first report of an explosion and shooting at the Bataclan concert hall, which has been a Paris entertainment landmark since the 19th century.
Third blast at the stadium
As police were responding, they received word of a third explosion at the soccer stadium. Police said that at 9:50 p.m., a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a McDonald’s restaurant near the stadium, but no one else was hurt. By then, spectators at the stadium had learned, mainly through messages on their phones, that Paris was under attack.
Inside the concert hall
At the concert hall, meanwhile, at least two attackers, young men wearing black clothes and strapped with tan suicide vests, walked calmly inside, witnesses said. They stood coolly near the entrance, methodically shooting panicked concert-goers, reloading and shooting more.
“They were not moving,” Julien Pearce, a journalist who was in the crowd, told CNN. “They were just standing at the back of the concert room and shooting at us. Like if we were birds.”
Louis H., 26, who declined to give his last name because of security concerns, said he sometimes works as a technician at the club, but Friday night he went as a spectator, taking his mother to see the California-based rock back Eagles of Death Metal.
A little more than an hour into the show, at about 9:40, he said he heard what sounded like firecrackers coming from the entrance at the rear of the hall.
“Then a lot of people started screaming, I realized something was wrong,” Louis said. “The band stopped playing and the lights went on. Some people were on the ground, some of them were running.”
He and his mother had been in the “theater pit,” a standing-room area in front of the stage, when the shooting started. He said he grabbed his mother and pinned her to the floor, using his arms to try to protect her head.
“We were lying down on the floor, trying not to move, pretending we were dead,” he said. “Meanwhile, we could hear gunshots, screaming and the gunmen reloading their weapons. I did not look at them. This was the last thing I wanted to do. Looking at them would have increased my chances of dying.”
Louis said they lay still on the floor for about 10 minutes, then they heard someone say, “The gunmen are gone.”
“I didn’t think twice, it was time to escape,” he said. “I took my mother by the hand and we rushed towards the backstage exit. On the way, I saw several dead bodies and people injured. It was a massacre.”
Louis said it was only after he got outside that he realized the attackers were still inside.
The French newspaper Le Monde posted video showing many people pouring out of what appear to be emergency entrances to the hall, while gunshots can be heard in the background. Several people who seem to be dead lie in the street, while others drag bleeding friends away from the scene. Several can be seen trying to climb out windows; one woman is shown hanging by her hands from a third-floor window.
One witness, who identified herself as Jasmine, told BFMTV that the attackers announced their motive.
“They said, ‘What you’ve done to Syrians, well, now you’re paying for it,'” she said. “Lots of bodies fell. I ran into a body. And then I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, there were lots of corpses around me. One guy shot me in the ankle. I’ve never seen as many dead people around me in my entire life. I’m traumatized.”
Witnesses said the shooting lasted about 10 minutes, then the gunmen held the remaining concertgoers hostage for the next two hours. When police finally stormed the concert hall, the attackers blew themselves up.
Police have said at least 89 people were killed there.
