The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 see the stairs at the end. The shield — 80kg of it — escaped their grasp and fell down the steps, and the terrorists sprang forward, guns pointed at the officers. The two men at the front of the police column reacted faster. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai were shot dead before they could pull the triggers on their Kalashnikovs.

      It was 12.20am and the siege had ended.

      An hour or so later Professor Philippe Juvin, head of the accident and emergency department at Georges Pompidou Hospital, learnt that the wounded were being evacuated. He was told to expect a large number of casualties.

      Juvin had already asked the usual Friday night array of patients waiting in A&E — the drunks, the hypochondriacs, the footballers who had sprained their ankles — to go home unless they were critical. All but two did. He had summoned all available staff and put out a Twitter message asking for help from doctors or nurses in the vicinity.

      Juvin, 52, is a slim, energetic doctor who speaks with a quietly reassuring certainty. He does not look like the sort to panic in a crisis and he is used to dealing with bullet wounds inflicted by combat rifles. Not only did he spend eight months with the French army in Afghanistan, but his A&E department regularly receives gangsters injured in gunfights.

      The wounds are not pretty — “If a pistol bullet hits the foot it goes in and out,” he says. “With a Kalashnikov bullet, there is no foot left” — but at least they rarely get more than one victim at a time.

      That night, his department treated 53 patients with Kalashnikov wounds. “The big difference is that the people we get with bullet wounds are usually the bad guys. We treat them because it’s our job but we don’t necessarily have much sympathy for them.

      “On November 13, we were getting people like you and me, or like our children. We could identify with them. There was an emotional load.”

      It was a frantic night. There were too many ambulances — 30 or so — for the A&E reception area. No one had imagined so many turning up at once. They created a traffic jam and Juvin had to go into the street to cast an eye over the casualties in the ambulances. Signs of an internal haemorrhage? He waved the ambulance on. A bullet in the arm? He told the patient to do the last 50m on a stretcher.

      Juvin and his improvised team — the hospital’s doctors and nurses and those who had turned up to help — checked pulse, blood pressure, wounds. Who needed an immediate operation? Who could wait until the next day?

      They flew down corridors, bandaged injuries, made rapid life-or-death decisions. Yet Juvin’s abiding memory of that night is of silence. “They had debilitating wounds that were probably very painful, and nobody spoke.

      “Usually people tell you when it’s hurting. There, everyone was in a state of stupefaction. I went into a cubicle and there was a man with a badly damaged leg. I think he was in pain, but he was saying nothing. I said to the doctor treating him to give him morphine anyway.

      “He was somewhere else and could not express his pain. When you have experienced something like that, you enter a dimension that no one can describe.”

      By 6.30am A&E was empty, the patients all having been dispatched to operating theatres or to other departments. None had died in care during the night.

      Juvin went home to sleep. He couldn’t. He came back to the hospital. There was a queue of people waiting to give blood and families turning up to ask whether their relatives had been hospitalised at Georges Pompidou. Among them was Georges Salines, a doctor who heads the Environmental and Health Office at the Paris council. He had gone to bed the previous evening unaware that Lola, his 28-year-old daughter, was at СКАЧАТЬ