The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  They had just sat down and were about to order a drink when bullets ripped into the bar and into customers’ bodies from the pavement.

  “I knew straightaway that I’d been hit. I realised it was serious. I lost an enormous amount of blood, the rescue services had not arrived, and I felt the strength leaving my body. I had time to think — and I can say this very calmly today — I had time to think about death.

  “I thought, ‘I am going to die.’ I would not say I was panicking just then, but I was not in a good way and I was afraid.”

  Later on, in hospital, Triomphe discovered that he had been hit by three bullets. One stopped 2mm short of his intestine, another cut through his sciatic nerve and a third went through his arm. He tells the tale now with alacrity, almost amusement, as we sit in another bar near his Parisian home.

  At the time, the ambulance crew was unsure whether he would pull through.

  “I realised they were afraid that I would faint and at one point I really felt a sort of great tiredness, like I would slip into sleep. I realised I had to fight against that, and I made enormous efforts to not slip into that sleep.”

  Outside there was chaos. The three jihadists who had attacked Café Bonne Bière had sprayed five other bars and restaurants with bullets. Minutes earlier three more had detonated suicide vests outside the national football stadium in the capital’s suburbs. A further three were in the process of slaying concert-goers during a gig by the US rock group Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan venue.

  The French equivalent of the 999 line faced an avalanche of calls — more than 6,000 to the police alone. Operators struggled to work out who had been shot and where. Ambulance crews wondered whether they would be targeted while tending to the wounded. Police squads were sent to one location, then diverted to another. And journalists — me included — tried to work out what on earth was going on.

  The newsdesk asked me to go the Stade de France when the first bomb went off. I ordered a taxi, then discovered that there was a siege at the Bataclan and told the driver to go there. I never reached it. Paris was in lockdown and a line of police blocked me a couple of hundred metres away.

  I sat on a bench and interviewed a man whose son had been shot in the foot in a restaurant farther to the east — or that is what he had been told by his son’s friend, who had phoned him. Like me, he was stuck behind police lines watching columns of armoured vehicles rumble towards the scene of the shootings. Like me, he had no idea what to do.

  For want of a better idea, I took the Parisian version of a Boris bike to cycle through streets deserted by everyone except armed officers. The Rue de Rivoli was eerily empty, the Marais devoid of life. Bars and clubs had closed, and been ordered to lock their customers inside. I got into one — the only place I could find with an internet connection at 1am — and ended up writing my dispatch amid inebriated nightclubbers struggling to comprehend what had happened.

  We discovered the next morning that 130 people had died and 414 were hospitalised.

  Now, with the first anniversary of the shootings and bombings approaching, I am going back over the events of that night, and they still seem as absurd and macabre as ever.

  The people I interviewed for this article — the injured, the bereaved, the emergency service representatives — share anger and pain but also perplexity at the sheer senselessness, the incredible stupidity of it all. The attacks — and those that followed in Nice, where 86 people died on Bastille Day, and in Normandy, where a priest was murdered in his church — have propelled France into a disturbing new era. There is distrust and fear, and a widening gulf between the white majority and the Muslim minority.

  Yet among the survivors I met, there was little expression of hatred for the Kalashnikov-wielding thugs who perpetrated the Paris shootings — more a sense of withering disdain. “Cretins” was how the father of one victim described them. Triomphe said they were pawns in a sinister game that they did not understand.

  Ten months earlier, 17 people had been killed in attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish kosher store in Paris.

  Parisians knew another massacre was likely. Islamic State had called on its followers to target the French because of their involvement in the Syrian bombing campaign and their perceived hostility to Islam. The movement had more jihadists from France in its ranks than from any other European country and many had returned from the war zone. Nevertheless, the attack, when it came, caught Paris by surprise.

  “We heard loud noises but we didn’t pay any attention. We just said to ourselves, ‘They’re Americans, they are putting on a show, they’ve got out some bangers.’”

  Sophie is among 1,500 people who experienced at first hand the blind callousness of Islamist fanaticism when it struck at the Bataclan during a concert. She is a 32-year-old rock music fan who works in a baby-sitting agency, and we meet in her studio flat, which is decorated according to her distinctive tastes. There are several model Tardises that bear witness to her passion for Doctor Who.

  On the back of the front door Sophie has stuck tickets from countless concerts and films she has seen. But there have been hardly any additions since last November. Sophie and Léa, her friend, had found a vantage point on a platform at the back of the Bataclan and the band was playing Kiss the Devil, one of its hits, when Foued Mohamed-Aggad, 23, Ismael Omar Mostefai, 29, and Samy Amimour, 28, burst into the venue.

  First came the noise. Then the confusion and panic.

  “All of a sudden, I had a big pain in my leg, it was like I’d been hit with a hammer, and that’s when I realised what was happening,” says Sophie. “I turned my head and saw three people with guns in their hands who were shouting at us, who were shouting that they were doing this for Syria and for Iraq.”

  The majority of the 90 people who died in the Bataclan were killed in the first 7 minutes, when the terrorists sprayed the crowd with bullets. That, probably, is when Sophie was hit.

  Then, for a quarter of an hour, Mohamed-Aggad, Mostefai and Amimour walked through the crowd cowering on the floor and executed people, apparently at random.

  Sophie saw them approach. “They were three metres from me, and then I was really, really frightened because when they made eye contact with someone, they shot them.

  “I had a T-shirt with skeletons and tattoos on my arms and I was afraid they would see me, so I quickly put on my jumper and thought if they don’t see me, if I don’t exist, I’ll survive.”

  Earlier — before the killings — a young man had caught her when she stumbled. Now he had been shot and was lying beside her. “I saw his chest stop moving — he was right next to me — and with Léa, we put him on us to protect ourselves.” The terrorists went past without noticing them under the now lifeless body.

  At about 10pm, two local police officers entered the venue and shot dead Amimour. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai fled upstairs, and silence descended upon the Bataclan. Sophie and Léa — and hundreds of other terrified rock fans — ran for the exit and carried on running until finally she sank to the ground by a door in Boulevard Voltaire.

  “In fact, I was really hurting, but it was only when I saw the mass of flesh on my leg — it was absolutely horrible — that I realised I had been hit with a bullet. I smelt the smell of blood, and my shoe was full of blood,” says Sophie. Léa stopped a minicab and told the driver to head for the nearest hospital. Sophie had been hit twice, in the calf and the thigh, and was almost unconscious when she got there. She was bloodied, terrified, shocked — but alive.

  At about the same time — 10.10pm — Chief Superintendent Christophe Molmy was entering the concert hall. Molmy, 47, is a tough cop — powerfully built, exuding understated authority and with a nose that looks like it has been flattened by a baseball bat. He heads the elite Parisian police Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) and is accustomed to arresting hardened gangsters.

  Shoot-outs are his bread and butter. He had been involved in one two days before November 13 when kidnap
pers had got jumpy during a ransom handover. He recounts the incident as you or I might recount the breakdown of a photocopier in the office. An ordinary problem in an ordinary day’s work. The Bataclan was different: haunting, traumatic, life-changing, even for him.

  Molmy had created a rapid intervention unit after the Charlie Hebdo killings: 15 men who take their guns and stun grenades home at night so they can scramble within minutes. Now they were picking their way across a mass of bodies in a silence interrupted only by the sound of phones ringing as relatives sought news of their loved ones. Some were dead, some injured, some too frightened to move.

  “We were destabilised because we had the wounded pulling at our trousers and asking us to help them while we were advancing. The members of the team all have medical training and tried to do what they could, applying tourniquets and talking to people, but you advance nevertheless. If you don’t do things with method they do not work out well.”

  His unit had to make the venue safe for medics, rescue workers and forensic scientists. Molmy had no idea if the terrorists were still there. Perhaps they had fled with the 900 or so spectators who had left with Sophie and Léa. Perhaps they had booby-trapped the hall.

  The team took 50 minutes or so to check the ground floor as survivors emerged from the toilets, the cupboards, the electrical cabinets, the suspended ceilings where they had been sheltering. Each one had to be checked in case they had explosives strapped to their bodies — a common Islamic State tactic in Syria. None did.

  But of Mohamed-Aggad or Mostefai there was not a trace. “There was no noise, no shots, nothing,” says Molmy. “I said to myself that they had probably left, but we advanced prudently just in case.”

  At about 11pm, the unit went upstairs. Still there was silence. Still they went on.

  Suddenly a petrified voice shouted, “Stop. Don’t advance. They have taken us hostage.”

  Molmy realised that Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai had not fled. They were hiding in a corridor, and dozens of people were trapped with them: 15 to 20 behind the door, equal numbers in rooms off the corridor, and about 40 on the roof. Among them was a pregnant woman and a boy of 12.

  Shouting through the door to the corridor, officers persuaded the terrorists to give them the number of one of the hostage’s phones so the brigade’s negotiator could call them.

  The negotiator talked five times to them, at 11.27pm, 11.29pm, 11.48pm, 12.05am and 12.18am. “They were very nervous and tense and a bit incoherent,” says Molmy. “They were saying, ‘We want you to leave,’ but obviously we weren’t going to.

  “They recited the jihadist diatribe, ‘It’s your fault — you’ve come to wage war in Syria so we are bringing the war to you.’”

  The negotiator asked the jihadists to release the child. They refused. He asked them to release the women. They refused again.

  The negotiator said he was getting nowhere — how could he with people determined to die and to kill? — and Molmy came to the conclusion that an assault was inevitable. The corridor was 1.35m wide and 8.5m long, it was full of hostages and at the far end were Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai. “It didn’t look good to us. We thought there would be damage for us — dead and wounded — and deaths among the hostages.”

  As soon as the officers entered the corridor, Mohammed-Aggad and Mostefai opened fire. Bullets flew everywhere: 27 hit the bulletproof shield on wheels (nicknamed the Ramses) behind which the officers were sheltering. Others hit the ceiling, the walls. A ricochet flew into the left hand of one of the officers.

  Astonishingly, that was the only injury. For 90 seconds — an eternity, says Molmy — hostages were crawling under the shield or slipping beside it amid constant gunfire from the terrorists, and none was hit. “My colleagues at the front did an extraordinary job,” says Molmy. “They are heroes: they were being shot at all the time and they hardly responded. Throughout the intervention, from beginning to end, we fired a total of just 11 shots.”

  When all the hostages had been pulled out of the corridor, Molmy’s team advanced on the terrorists behind the thud of stun grenades. But in the smoke-filled corridor, the two officers pushing the Ramses did not see the stairs at the end. The shield — 80kg of it — escaped their grasp and fell down the steps, and the terrorists sprang forward, guns pointed at the officers. The two men at the front of the police column reacted faster. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai were shot dead before they could pull the triggers on their Kalashnikovs.

  It was 12.20am and the siege had ended.

  An hour or so later Professor Philippe Juvin, head of the accident and emergency department at Georges Pompidou Hospital, learnt that the wounded were being evacuated. He was told to expect a large number of casualties.

  Juvin had already asked the usual Friday night array of patients waiting in A&E — the drunks, the hypochondriacs, the footballers who had sprained their ankles — to go home unless they were critical. All but two did. He had summoned all available staff and put out a Twitter message asking for help from doctors or nurses in the vicinity.

  Juvin, 52, is a slim, energetic doctor who speaks with a quietly reassuring certainty. He does not look like the sort to panic in a crisis and he is used to dealing with bullet wounds inflicted by combat rifles. Not only did he spend eight months with the French army in Afghanistan, but his A&E department regularly receives gangsters injured in gunfights.

  The wounds are not pretty — “If a pistol bullet hits the foot it goes in and out,” he says. “With a Kalashnikov bullet, there is no foot left” — but at least they rarely get more than one victim at a time.

  That night, his department treated 53 patients with Kalashnikov wounds. “The big difference is that the people we get with bullet wounds are usually the bad guys. We treat them because it’s our job but we don’t necessarily have much sympathy for them.

  “On November 13, we were getting people like you and me, or like our children. We could identify with them. There was an emotional load.”

  It was a frantic night. There were too many ambulances — 30 or so — for the A&E reception area. No one had imagined so many turning up at once. They created a traffic jam and Juvin had to go into the street to cast an eye over the casualties in the ambulances. Signs of an internal haemorrhage? He waved the ambulance on. A bullet in the arm? He told the patient to do the last 50m on a stretcher.

  Juvin and his improvised team — the hospital’s doctors and nurses and those who had turned up to help — checked pulse, blood pressure, wounds. Who needed an immediate operation? Who could wait until the next day?

  They flew down corridors, bandaged injuries, made rapid life-or-death decisions. Yet Juvin’s abiding memory of that night is of silence. “They had debilitating wounds that were probably very painful, and nobody spoke.

  “Usually people tell you when it’s hurting. There, everyone was in a state of stupefaction. I went into a cubicle and there was a man with a badly damaged leg. I think he was in pain, but he was saying nothing. I said to the doctor treating him to give him morphine anyway.

  “He was somewhere else and could not express his pain. When you have experienced something like that, you enter a dimension that no one can describe.”

  By 6.30am A&E was empty, the patients all having been dispatched to operating theatres or to other departments. None had died in care during the night.

  Juvin went home to sleep. He couldn’t. He came back to the hospital. There was a queue of people waiting to give blood and families turning up to ask whether their relatives had been hospitalised at Georges Pompidou. Among them was Georges Salines, a doctor who heads the Environmental and Health Office at the Paris council. He had gone to bed the previous evening unaware that Lola, his 28-year-old daughter, was at the Bataclan. He had not watched the television and had no idea that anything untoward was going on.

  At midnight Lola’s brother called. He knew about her plans and knew what had happened at the concert hall. He had tried to call her. There had been no answer.

&nbs
p; Salines, 59, a slender, fit-looking man with a welcoming smile and a precise discourse, telephoned the emergency helpline set up by the authorities after the attacks. He could not get through. He phoned again, and again, and again. The operator who responded at last — hours later — had no information about Lola and advised him to get in touch with the Paris hospitals. Hospital receptionists said they would phone back. None did.

  Somebody told Salines that Georges Pompidou Hospital had patients whose identities had not been established. But when the family arrived, managers said that was untrue. The patients had been identified. Lola was not among them.

  “It was only at the end of the afternoon that we discovered her death in very painful circumstances,” said Salines. A friend had telephoned the emergency helpline, which was functioning correctly by now, and the operator disclosed that Lola’s name was on the list of the dead.

  Word got around. It appeared on the internet. There was a denial and confusion. Salines called the emergency number himself. The operator confirmed Lola’s death.

  “My daughter died for nothing, for an illusion, for a folly. It’s absurd,” Salines said in L’Indicible de A à Z (The Unspeakable from A to Z), a book about his reaction to the attacks.

  In it, he describes Lola, who worked in the children’s books department of a publisher, in these terms: “You liked books, films, drawing, travelling, rock music, children, Billy the Cat, lemon tart, Belgian beer, brunch at the Bouillon Belge bar, singing while playing the ukulele, roller derbies, your friends, your mum, your brothers, your boyfriend, your girlfriends, a kiss on the cheek, making love. You loved life. And all those who knew you liked you.”

  The months have passed and the scars remain — physical or psychological — for those involved.

  Sophie needed two operations, three general anaesthetics — the third to change her bandages — and 43 stitches. She has a bullet in her pelvis and fears that grip her day and night.