“The police evacuated Monsieur Valls five minutes after the gunfire.” That is the account of the owner of a café located next to French prime minister Manuel Valls's home in Paris's 11th arrondissement, which is some 300 metres from rue de Charonne, one of the scenes of the terrorist shootings that hit the French capital on November 13th. “We heard the gunfire and we thought it was a settling of scores,” the café boss told Mediapart. “A person came running and she went towards the police who were opposite. They adopted the firing position, taking aim. Monsieur Valls left very quickly.”
The prime minister's rapid departure also caught the attention of others in the area. “We heard the gunshots from here,” said the boss of another bar nearby. “We saw a convoy that was taking Manuel Valls: there were five or six black cars.”
The Journal du dimanche newspaper has already reported that on the night of the attacks the French prime minister had left his home to go to the ministry of the interior at 9.40pm, after a conversation with President François Hollande, but without making the link with the proximity of the shootings to his residence. According to witness accounts obtained by Mediapart the gendarmes on duty at the entrance to the street where the prime minister lives heard the shots, and immediately alerted the ministerial escort. The secret services then ensured that the prime minister got away safely; in doing so they were following their rules and official orders, meaning they were unable to come to the assistance of persons in danger.
According to the timetable of events given by Paris prosecutor François Molins, the attack that took place at the corner of rue de Charonne and rue Faidherbe, and which targeted La Belle Équipe café, occurred at 9.36pm. Manuel Valls's head of communications has confirmed to Mediapart that the prime minister left his home at 9.40pm that night.
The prosecution also revealed on Wednesday that the GPS system in the terrorists' black Seat car later found at Montreuil, east of Paris, plus CCTV footage confirmed that just one group of attackers was behind the machine gunning of the terraces of bars and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements on Friday night. Separate units carried out the attacks at the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall.
This means that the shooters in the Seat covered around three kilometres in about 15 minutes, between their first attack at Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge in rue Bichat, the second at the La Bonne Bière brasserie and the Casa Nostra restaurant in rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, the third at the La Belle Équipe, rue de Charonne, and the last one at the Comptoir Voltaire, not far from the Place de la Nation, all without encountering a single police unit. The attacks started at 9.25pm and ended at 9.40pm, according to François Molins. Checks made by Mediapart show that police units arrived at the targeted cafés and restaurants nearly ten minutes after the gunmen had left them.
Several witnesses say they were forced to wait for the police to arrive at rue de Charonne even though the police station for the 11th arrondissement is just 300 metres away, in passage Charles-Dallery. A film crew from the M6 television station who happened to be filming a documentary with the fire service arrived at La Belle Équipe with a fire crew before the police. Nineteen people had been shot dead there. “The police took 15 minutes to arrive,” said the boss of a neighbouring restaurant. He said they arrived via rue Faidherbe. It seems, then, that the first police officers at this scene came not from the nearby police station but were a unit from the 12th arrondissement, based at avenue Daumesnil.
When he first heard the shots the restaurant owner said he came out and went towards the street corner. Before he got around the corner he realised what was going on and went back to his premises. There he turned out the lights, ushered the customers into the kitchen and continued to “keep an eye out”. He said: “I was looking to see that they were not coming here. I think that it was the same person who was shooting all the time, in staccato bursts, because there were no other shots at the same time. The police took a quarter of an hour to come, perhaps there was no longer anyone at the 11th arrondissement police station. Perhaps they were all at La République [editor's note, Place de la République, close to the first two shootings].” The gunmen had “gone back up the street” to boulevard Voltaire, and had then turned right towards the Place de la Nation.
Closer to this attack was the owner of a sandwich bar who had his back to the street when a customer cried out: “Boss! Run behind, they're shooting!”. The owner said: “I turned off the light and with my wife, my daughter and the customer we went in the back, and we locked ourselves in the kitchen.” The shots seemed to go on for an eternity. “More than five minutes,” he said. “They were turning around in the street.”
A witness, hidden in a neighbouring shop, saw two gunmen. The terrorist targeted La Belle Équipe but they also fired at the window of a hairdressing salon and a kebab store. “They fired at Le Palais de la femme [editors note, a women's refuge], where people had gone to take refuge,” said the sandwich bar boss. “There is a mark next to the door.” When the shooting finally stopped the sandwich bar owner looked out towards La Belle Équipe and saw the full scale of the crime. “There were dead people everywhere, people crying out,” he said. According to him the police only came 20 minutes after the attack started. “Too late!” he said. When asked by Mediapart, police headquarters in Paris did not give any details about the role of the police station in the 11th arrondissement.
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The wave of shootings had started at rue Bichat where the first two establishments, Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge, were targeted at 9.25pm. The owner of a large café nearby, who was outside at the time, saw what he took to be “explosions”. His first reaction was that it was fireworks but quickly changed his mind when he saw people rushing away. “The police arrived eight to twelve minutes after the gunmen left. People said they took a long time, but in the first few minutes I was not focussing on calling the emergency services.” The police teams who did turn up came along rue Bichat, probably from the central police station for the 10th arrondissement in rue Louis-Blanc.
The gunmen continued on their route and stopped at the bottom of rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, at 9.32pm according to prosecutor François Molins. There they targeted the terraces of La Bonne Bière brasserie and the Casa Nostra restaurant, and also a motorist who was shot dead at the junction. A confectioner, based a few metres up the street, sheltered some of the customers from La Bonne Bière, some of whom were wounded. “I was the first refuge,” he said. “They came out running and I took them into my courtyard.” He said the gunfire lasted “four to five minutes”. He continued: “I opened the porch a little to see if the police were arriving. It was a quarter of an hour between the end of the shooting and the arrival of the police.” There was general confusion at the time as police suspected there was a gunman in a neighbouring building, and that was searched by officers from the rapid intervention unit, the GIGN, who had arrived at the scene.
The gunmen, meanwhile, had headed for rue de Charonne, and swiftly too, according to the official version of events. The prosecutor said that having got to La Bonne Bière at 9.32pm they had arrived in front of La Belle Équipe by 9.36pm. They had probably driven via place Léon-Blum – where the East Paris headquarters for France's Vigipirate national security alert system is situated – avenue Ledru-Rollin and rue Basfroi. This is not far from the home of prime minister Manuel Valls, who had still not been evacuated at this point.
After the massacre at rue de Charonne the gunmen completed their murderous attacks at the Comptoir Voltaire, close to Place de la Nation, fifteen minutes after they had begun. At 9.40pm one of the terrorist team detonated his suicide vest full of explosives on the café's terrace, seriously wounding two people and wounding another ten more lightly. The scene is still sealed off. Small bits of white fibre from the suicide jacket are still spread over much of the terrace.
“He came onto the terrace, turned around and blew himself up,” said a local resident. The terrorist apparently faced the customers but only the explosives that he was carrying on his back seem to have exploded, limiting the number of serious injuries. A casualty nurse who was in the bar placed a waitress who had been hit in the stomach on her side in the recovery position. He then tried to help the terrorist, who had been thrown onto the window, without knowing that it was he who had caused the explosion. “He opened his shirt to give him cardiac massage, and it was then that he saw the multicoloured fibres of his [suicide] vest, and understood that something wasn't right,” said the local resident. According to several customers the rescue services – fire brigade and ambulance – arrived about ten minutes after the explosion, closely followed by the police. It was the firefighters who realised the danger and evacuated the cafe while bomb disposal experts arrived.
But the escape by the remainder of the terrorist team – it is still not known for sure if there were two or three of them – carried on as far as Montreuil, about 8km to the east where the black Seat was abandoned. Meanwhile the police, confronted with this wave of attacks, arrived at each crime scene only to find that the gunmen had already moved on to the next one. As a result of the speed of their operation, the terrorists did not once come across a police unit. “Questions will have to be asked about the system for intervening in multi-attacks,” said one Paris police officer. “We were left behind on everything.”
None of the local residents spoken to by Mediapart had yet been interviewed by investigators.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter