Stade de France
The stadium shakes under foot as three explosions erupt at 9.20pm local time, 9.30pm and 9.53pm during a football friendly between France and Germany. The 80,000 spectators in the stadium aren’t given any information and many believe the explosions to be firecrackers. The players on the pitch look distracted at times, but play on.
Among the spectators are President François Hollande with the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Hollande takes a phone call in the stadium’s security control room just after 9.30pm. As the truth dawns, Hollande is rushed out of the stadium to the secure interior ministry where he convenes an emergency cabinet meeting.
The match is allowed to run its course – France winning 2-0 – but at the final whistle supporters congregate on the pitch because only three exits are now open. The players remain in their changing rooms.
It emerges that four people – three of whom are terrorists wearing suicide belts, said prosecutors – have died in the explosions, which occurred at two entrances to the stadium and outside a McDonald’s. Reports later circulate that one of the terrorists was carrying a Syrian passport. When the fans are finally allowed out of the stadium they sing the national anthem, La Marseillaise.
Bataclan
About 1,500 people are packed into the small concert hall in the 11th arrondissement in eastern Paris for a sold-out concert by the Californian rock group Eagles of Death Metal when rounds of machine gunfire ring out at 9.40pm, 45 minutes into the performance. Clad in black and wielding AK-47s, three gunmen – no older than 25 – fire calmly, repeatedly and randomly into the densely packed audience. It is dark. The venue is filled with screams. The shooters reload three to four times. One is heard to shout “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) as he fires.
Panicking members of the crowd try to flee and hide, scrambling over the dead bodies, running from room to room looking for a hiding place. Others climb out of windows at the back, gripping on to window sills to stop themselves falling to the road below. The assailants hold 20 hostages back. “I clearly heard them say: ‘It’s the fault of Hollande, it’s the fault of your president, he should not have intervened in Syria,’” said Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter, who fled to hide in a toilet but could overhear the terrorists as they spoke to their terrified captives.
Those trapped inside use social media to implore the police to act. “I’m still in the Bataclan, 1st floor,” tweets one. “I’m heavily wounded. Please police you have to launch an assault, there are still people alive here but they are killing them one by one.”
Special forces storm the venue at 12.20am as it becomes clear the terrorists are continuing to murder people inside. Within two minutes of the raid, all the gunmen are dead. Two of them blow themselves up. A third is shot. As night turns to day, the death toll stands at 89. “It was a bloodbath,” Julien Pearce, a reporter for France’s Europe 1 radio station, tells reporters. “People yelled, screamed and everybody lying on the floor, and it lasted for 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 horrific minutes where everybody was on the floor covering their head.”
Restaurant La Belle Equipe, Rue de Charonne
At the intersection of Rue Faidherbe and Rue de Charonne, at 9.36pm, witnesses see a man get out of a car with a high-calibre weapon. Calmly he begins to fire at people enjoying an evening at La Belle Equipe, which had been fully booked on a typically busy night in this popular part of Paris. Diners are sitting outside on the terrace. Within seconds, the happy clamour of the evening ends and everyone, dead or alive, is on the ground. Screams, and the moans of the injured are all that can be heard among the gunfire. A Le Monde journalist who lives nearby recounts: “I heard explosions, I went to my window. I have a direct view of the cafe. I saw a man get out of a car. He fired several times. I heard screams. Then the man got back into his car and left.”
Another witness adds: “It lasted at least three minutes. Then they got back in their car and headed towards Charonne station. There was blood everywhere”. Nineteen people died here, including a plain clothes police officer.
Boulevard Voltaire
A terrorist detonates his suicide belt inside the Voltaire restaurant at 9.40pm, on Boulevard Voltaire, a long road linking Place de la République with Place de la Nation. One person is seriouslly injured. The dead attacker is believed to have been involved in the attack at the nearby Bataclan. Photographs emerge of police searching the Comptoir Voltaire, a cafe towards the south of Boulevard Voltaire. It was on this road that world leaders marched down in a show of solidarity after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January.
Le Carillon bar and restaurant; le Petit Camboge, Rue Alibert
At 9.25pm a gunman opens fire on Le Carillon bar in Rue Alibert, not far from Place de la République, before heading across the road to Le Petit Cambodge. It sounds like fireworks. Then the gravity of the situation dawns on diners and drinkers.
One woman looking down on the scene from her home later says she is sure that she saw two assailants and that they had travelled to the scene in cars, one of which she says had Belgian number plates. The unnamed witness told Le Monde: “I saw one of the two black cars from in front of my house; I saw the front passenger who was very young, I would say he was 18 to 20.” Another witness said shots were fired from a Ford Focus.
A young woman who arrives at the scene shortly after the attack breaks down. “It was surreal, everyone was on the ground”, she told reporters. “No one was moving inside the Petit Cambodge and everyone was on the ground in Carillon bar. It was very calm – people didn’t understand what was going on.
“A girl was being carried in the arms of a young man. She seemed to be dead.”
Fifteen are dead here and 10 are injured. A car has been left riddled with bullets and a motorbike abandoned on the ground.
Casa Nostra, Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi
Wearing tight black clothes and carrying a heavy weapon, a gunman opens fire on to the terrace of the popular pizzeria and La Bonne Biere bar at 9.32pm.
Left-handed, he fires in bursts of three or four shots. Psychotherapist Mark Colclough, a 43-year-old British-Danish dual citizen, who was 20 yards from the cafe when the attack was launched, says: “He was standing in a shooting position. He had his right leg forward and he was standing with his left leg back. He was holding up to his left shoulder a long automatic machine gun – I saw it had a magazine beneath it. Everything he was wearing was tight, either boots or shoes and the trousers were tight, the jumper he was wearing was tight, no zippers or collars. Everything was toned black.
“If you think of what a combat soldier looks like, that is it – just without the webbing. Just a man in military uniform, black jumper, black trousers, black shoes or boots and a machine gun.”
At least three diners fall dead from their chairs to the ground. The gunmen, who appears calm and does not utter a word, swivels and shoots through a car driver’s window before, witnesses say, walking into the cafe. There are further shots before it goes quiet. When the police arrive they fail to find the assailant. Five people have been murdered and eight more injured.