On the evening of November 13, 2015, jihadist commandos left 130 dead and 350 wounded outside the Stade de France near Paris, on terraces in the capital and in the Bataclan performance hall.
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France has just experienced the deadliest attacks ever committed on its soil, the first committed by suicide bombers
Three suicide bombers blew themselves up at the gates of the Stade de France, in Saint-Denis, between 9:20 p.m. and 9:53 p.m. during a friendly football match between France and Germany. A 63-year-old Portuguese bus driver who has lived in France for a long time, Manuel Colaco Dias, is killed.
President François Hollande is discreetly evacuated from the stadium so as not to trigger a crowd movement among the 80,000 supporters. Entries and exits are closed until the end of the match.
- Listen to a Bataclan survivor’s interview with Benoit Dutrizac on QUB Radio:
Meanwhile, a commando of three men circulating in a black Seat shoots Parisian terraces, crowded on this sweet autumnal evening, in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of the capital. 39 people die in half an hour under assault rifle fire.
The restaurant Le Petit Cambodge and the bar Le Carillon, near the Saint-Martin canal, are the first targeted at 9:25 p.m., then the bar A la Bonne beer, the pizzeria Casa Nostra and the bistro La Bellequipe. One of the attackers ended up blowing himself up in the Comptoir Voltaire café, causing several injuries.
Two kilometers away, at the Bataclan, Californian rock band Eagles of Death Metal perform in front of 1,500 enthusiastic people.
He plays the song Kiss the devil (“Kiss the devil”) when a third commando burst into the concert hall at 9:40 p.m. and start firing. The carnage will kill 90 people.
Survivors find hiding places or feign death among the corpses entangled in the pit, others manage to escape.
Shortly before 10 p.m., a police superintendent entered the room, killed an assailant whose belt exploded. The other two jihadists are holding hostages upstairs. Both died in the explosion of their belts when the elite forces stormed at 12:18 am.
The Islamic State organization claims responsibility for the attacks, investigators track down fugitive terrorists and their accomplices.
A figure of francophone jihadism in Syria, the Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, alleged coordinator of the attacks and assaulting terraces, was killed on November 18 in the police assault on an apartment in Saint-Denis, as was an accomplice who was detonated and a cousin who had found them this safe house.
The only member of the commandos still alive, the Franco-Belgian Salah Abdeslam, was arrested four months later in Brussels.
He is to be tried in early 2021 in Paris along with 19 other suspects (logisticians, escorts and suspected intermediaries), including five – probably dead in the Iraqi-Syrian zone – in their absence.