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 kidnappers 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