There was no immediate verifiable claim of responsibility but
supporters of the Islamic State militant group, which controls swathes
of Iraq and Syria, said in Twitter messages that the group carried them
out.
Gunmen and bombers attacked
restaurants, a concert hall and a sports stadium at locations across
Paris on Friday, killing at least 120 people in a deadly rampage that a
shaken President Francois Hollande called an unprecedented terrorist attack.
A Paris city hall official said four gunmen systematically slaughtered at least 87 young people attending a rock concert at the Bataclan music
hall. Anti-terrorist commandos eventually launched an assault on the
building. The gunmen detonated explosive belts and dozens of shocked
survivors were rescued.
Some 40 more people were
killed in five other attacks in the Paris region, the city hall official
said, including an apparent double suicide bombing outside the national
stadium, where Hollande and the German foreign minister were watching a
friendly soccer international. Some 200 people were injured.
The
coordinated assault came as France, a founder member of the U.S.-led
coalition waging air strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria and
Iraq, was on high alert for terrorist attacks ahead of a global climate
conference due to open later this month.
Paris Public Prosecutor Francois Molins
said the death toll was at least 120. His spokeswoman said eight
assailants had also died, seven of whom had blown themselves up with
explosive belts at various locations, while one had been shot dead by
police.
"The terrorists, the murderers raked
several cafe terraces with machine-gun fire before entering (the concert
hall). There were many victims in terrible, atrocious conditions in
several places," police prefect Michel Cadot told reporters.
After
being whisked from the soccer stadium near the blasts, Hollande
declared a nationwide state of emergency - the first since the end of
World War Two - and announced the closure of France's borders to stop
perpetrators escaping.
The Paris metro railway was
closed and schools, universities and municipal buildings were ordered
to stay shut on Saturday. However some rail and air services are
expected to run.
"This is a horror," the visibly
shaken president said in a midnight television address to the nation
before chairing an emergency cabinet meeting.
He
later went to the scene of the bloodiest attack, the Bataclan music
hall, and vowed that the government would wage a "merciless" fight
against terrorism.
All emergency services were
mobilized, police leave was canceled, 1,500 army reinforcements were
drafted into the Paris region and hospitals recalled staff to cope with
the casualties.
The prosecutor's spokeswoman said she could not say whether any gunmen were still at large.
Radio
stations broadcast warnings to Parisians to stay home and leave the
streets and urged residents to give shelter to anyone caught out in the
street.
The deadliest attack was on the Bataclan, a
popular concert venue where the Californian rock group Eagles of Death
Metal was performing. The concert hall is just a few hundred meters from
the former offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, target of a
deadly attack by Islamist gunmen in January.
Some witnesses in the hall said they heard the gunmen shout Islamic chants and slogans condemning France's role in Syria.
"We
know where these attacks come from," Hollande said, without naming any
individual group. "There are indeed good reasons to be afraid."
HIGH ALERT
France has been on high alert ever since the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a kosher supermarket in Paris in January killed 18 people.
Those
attacks briefly united France in defense of freedom of speech, with a
mass demonstration of more than a million people. But that unity has
since broken down, with far-right populist Marine Le Pen gaining on both
mainstream parties by blaming immigration and Islam for France's
security problems.
It was not clear what political
impact the latest attacks would have less than a month before regional
elections in which Le Pen's National Front is set to make further
advances.
The governing Socialist Party and the
National Front suspended their election campaigns. Ex-president Nicolas
Sarkozy, now leader of the main conservative opposition party, said,
"The terrorists have declared war on France" and backed the state of
emergency and border closure.
Hollande canceled
plans to travel to Turkey at the weekend for a G20 summit. He called an
emergency meeting of his national security council for 9 a.m. (3.00 a.m.
ET) on Saturday.
U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel
led a global chorus of solidarity with France and U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the "despicable attacks" and
demanded the release of the hostages.
Julien Pearce,
a journalist from Europe 1 radio, was inside the concert hall when the
shooting began. In an eyewitness report posted on the station's website,
Pearce said several very young individuals, who were not wearing masks,
entered the hall during the concert, armed with Kalashnikov assault
rifles and started "blindly shooting at the crowd".
"There were bodies everywhere," he said.
The
gunmen shot their victims in the back, finishing some off at
point-blank range before reloading their guns and firing again, Pearce
said, after escaping into the street by a stage door, carrying a wounded
girl on his shoulder.
Toon, a 22 year-old
messenger who lives near the Bataclan, was going into the concert hall
with two friends at around 10.30 p.m. (2130 GMT) when he saw three young
men dressed in black and armed with machine guns. He stayed outside.
One
of the gunmen began firing into the crowd. "People were falling like
dominoes," he told Reuters. He said he saw people shot in the leg,
shoulder and back, with several lying on the floor, apparently dead.
There
was no immediate verifiable claim of responsibility but supporters of
the Islamic State militant group, which controls swathes of Iraq and
Syria, said in Twitter messages that the group carried them out.
"The State of the caliphate hit the house of the cross," one tweet said.
Two
explosions were heard near the Stade de France in the northern suburb
of Saint-Denis, where the France-Germany friendly soccer match was being
played. The blasts were audible on television during the live
broadcast.
A witness said one of the detonations blew people into the air outside a McDonald's restaurant opposite the stadium.
The
match continued until the end, but panic broke out in the crowd as
rumors of the attack spread, and spectators were held in the stadium and
assembled spontaneously on the pitch.
Police helicopters circled the stadium as Hollande was rushed back to the interior ministry to deal with the situation.
In central Paris, shooting erupted in mid-evening outside a Cambodian restaurant in the capital's 10th district.
Eighteen
people were killed when a gunman opened fire on Friday night diners
sitting at outdoor terraces in the popular Charonne area nearby in the
11th district.
The prosecutor mentioned five locations in close proximity where shootings took place around the same time.
The
Paris carnage came within days of attacks claimed by Islamic State
militants on a Shi'ite Muslim district of southern Beirut in Lebanon,
and a Russian tourist aircraft which crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
Earlier
on Friday, the United States and Britain said they had launched an
attack in the Syrian town of Raqqa on a British Islamic State militant
known as "Jihadi John", but it was not certain whether he had been
killed.
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