Erin Brown | Editor-in-Chief
At 21:20 (British time) on Friday 13th November, a suicide bomber detonated a device at the entrance gate to the Stade de France in Paris where a football match between France and Germany was taking place. The bomber was wearing a suicide belt and was reportedly prevented from entering the stadium after a routine security check detected the explosives. The man then allegedly backed away from guards and detonated the explosives. The bomber and a passer-by were killed.
Then, a second explosion detonated ten minutes later at 21:30, from a suicide vest outside a different entrance. It was then that the French President Hollande who had been attending the match, was rushed to safety. (There was also a third suicide bomber who blew himself up at a fast-food outlet near the stadium at 21:53.)
Five minutes on from the first explosion, at 21:25, 7 kilometres away in Central Paris, attackers with assault rifles killed 15 people and severely injured 15 more at Le Petit Cambodge Restaurant and Le Carillon Bar. At 21:32, a second gun attack on the Rue Fontaine au Roi results in the death of five more people and severely injures eight. A further attack then occurred at the Belle Equipe Bar four minutes later. Here, 19 people are shot dead and 9 are put in a critical condition.
Four minutes later, 3 men in a black Seat car arrive to the Bataclan concert hall and carry out the deadliest attack of the night. The hall has a capacity of 1,500 and the gig was sold out with the venue swelling. The attackers indiscriminately opened fire on the crowd, before the police infiltrated the building and killed one of the three attackers. At this, the other two men detonated their suicide bombs. Overall, this resulted in 89 deaths and 99 people being gravely wounded. It is reported that one of the men shouted in Arabic “God is great” before exploding the bomb. Another witness heard a gunman blame the night’s events on President Hollande for his action in Syria. Two of the bombers can be named as the Frenchman Omar Ismail Mostefai, 29 years old and Samy Animour, aged 28.
At the same time as the Bataclan shooting, a suicide bomber, a man called Braham Abdeslam, used a similar device to the bombs used at the Stade de France earlier in the evening to take his own life alone, severely wounding one other person.
Overall, the events of Friday 13th in Paris saw the death of 129 innocent lives, with hundreds left wounded and more than 100 in a critical condition.
This was the end of the attacks on Paris, but discussions around the world over security, intelligence and the war against terrorism have only just begun.
