PARIS (Reuters) -France paid an emotional tribute on Thursday to 130 people killed 10 years ago during a rampage by Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers targeting cafes, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall.
The attacks were the deadliest on French soil since World War Two, scarring the national psyche and prompting emergency security measures, many of which are now embedded in law.
The assault on November 13, 2015, began with suicide bomb blasts that killed one person, bus driver Manuel Dias, outside the Stade de France sports stadium where then-President Francois Hollande and the German foreign minister were watching a friendly soccer international, and continued with gunmen opening fire at five other locations in central Paris.
‘AN EMPTINESS THAT CANNOT BE FILLED’
“Since that November 13, there is an emptiness that cannot be filled,” Dias’ daughter Sophie said at the ceremony, her voice trembling with tears as she recalled the family’s endless phone calls through the night, trying to reach her father, before they were told he had been the attackers’ first victim.
President Emmanuel Macron was among senior officials who paid their respects to Dias and the other victims with a minute of silence and the laying of wreaths before the Stade de France.
Throughout the day Macron, survivors and relatives of victims will honour those killed and wounded at each of the sites of the attacks.
At the second ceremony, officials and representatives of victims’ associations also observed a minute of silence in front of the Carillon bar and the Petit Cambodge restaurant in central Paris, after a list of the 13 people killed there was read out.
Victims’ associations say two survivors of the attacks later committed suicide, bringing the total death toll to 132.
ATTACK ON THE BATACLAN
Sebastian Lascoux was inside the Bataclan where the rock band Eagles of Death Metal were playing when what he thought was the noise from firecrackers pierced the concert hall. It quickly became apparent that the venue was under attack.
People “ended up all squashed together and collapsed as one”, he said last month. “And then (there was) the smell of blood,” said Lascoux, now aged 46. One of his friends was shot dead trying to shield another member of their party.
Lascoux still suffers from post-traumatic stress and cannot be in crowded places or enclosed spaces, even cinemas. Loud pops remind him of gunshots.
“What made the November 13 attacks unique was that everyone was a potential victim,” historian Denis Peschanski said.
“Either they were old enough to be there, or, like me, they were old enough to have children who could have been there, even though I was lucky they weren’t.”
A decade on, the threat of such attacks in France has mutated. Militant jihadist groups such as Islamic State no longer have the same means to coordinate attacks on French soil, security sources say.
But the group’s online propaganda is still effective and able to radicalize youngsters fascinated with violence on social media. Anti-terrorism prosecutors this week launched a probe into the former partner of the presumed sole surviving perpetrator of the attacks.
(Reporting by Elissa Darwish, Antony Paone, Juliette Jabkhiro, Michel RoseWriting by Ingrid MelanderEditing by Richard Lough, Frances Kerry and Gareth Jones)
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