Hollande Blames ISIS for Attacks
The president of France declared Saturday that the massacre in Paris should be considered an act of war planned by the Islamic State and carried out with help from inside the country.
By REUTERS on November 14, 2015. Photo by Pool photo by Stephane De Sakutin. Watch in Times Video »
PARIS — The terrorist assault on Paris on Friday night was carried out by three teams of coordinated attackers, including one who traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants, officials said Saturday.
At a news conference on Saturday night, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests. Their assault began, he said, when two of them blew themselves up outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris.
A French security official said separately that one of the attackers had been linked to a Syrian passport. A Greek official had said earlier that the person carrying the passport had passed through Greece last month along the migrant trail into Europe.
The possibility that one of the attackers was a migrant or had posed as one is sure to further complicate the already vexing problem for Europe of how to handle the unceasing flow of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
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Details of the assault came after President François Hollande blamed the Islamic Statefor the terrorist attacks. Officials said Saturday night that the death toll had reached 129 victims, with 352 others injured, 99 of them seriously. Mr. Hollande declared three days of national mourning, and said that military troops would patrol the capital. France remained under a nationwide state of emergency.
“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” Mr. Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”
Mr. Hollande did not specify what intelligence pointed to the militant group’s involvement. On Saturday, the Islamic State claimed responsibilityfor the attacks, but its claim could not be independently verified.
As the day progressed, there were tentative indications that the attacks might have been supported by or linked to a sprawling network.
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The police raided a neighborhood in Brussels in connection with the Paris attacks, and made a number of arrests. A Greek official said that a Syrian passport used by a migrant who had passed through the island of Leros was found on a body at one of the attack sites. And in Germany, the police were exploring whether a man they arrested last week with weapons in his car and his GPS navigator set for Paris was linked to the attacks.
A French intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was still underway said that at least one of the attackers — a Frenchman from Chartres, about 90 kilometers southwest of Paris — was in the database of the country’s security services, indicating that he was a person of concern, and that one other attacker might have been a Syrian.
The Paris public prosecutor, François Molins, at a news conference on Saturday evening, laid out a chilling series of attacks that began at 9:20 p.m. Friday and lasted until 9:53.
Mr. Hollande vowed to “be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” adding that France would act within the law but with “all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”
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The attacks, and the possibility that the Islamic State was to blame, promised to further traumatize France and other European countries already fearful of violent jihadists radicalized by the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere. It could also lend weight to the xenophobic arguments of right-wing populists like Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party.
Much remained unknown: the identities of the eight attackers, who are all dead; whether any accomplices remained at large; and how a plot of such sophistication and lethality could have escaped the notice of intelligence agencies, both in France and abroad.
Mr. Hollande actively stepped up French participation in the military air campaign in Syria at the end of September. Just last week, France attacked oil operations under the Islamic State’s control in Syria. On Oct. 8, it conducted a targeted strike against militants in Raqqa, Syria, apparently targeting Salim Benghalem, a Frenchman fighting for the Islamic State.
Paris, stricken by shock and grief, remained in a state of lockdown, with public transportation hobbled and public institutions — schools, museums, libraries, pools, food markets — closed. Charles de Gaulle Airport remained open, but with significant delays because of tighter passport and baggage checks.
Video of Attack on Paris Concert Hall
Graphic video: Concertgoers, some visibly wounded, fled into an alley behind the Bataclan concert hall after assailants opened fire Friday night. The video was recorded by Daniel Psenny, a journalist for Le Monde.
By LE MONDE and via REUTERS on November 14, 2015. Photo by Daniel Psenny/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »
The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, said he would celebrate a Mass at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on Sunday for the victims, their families and France. “Our country has once again known pain and mourning and must stand up to the barbarism propagated by fanatical groups,” he said.
The authorities continued to search for possible accomplices of the eight attackers known so far, all of whom died on Friday: seven by detonating suicide bombs and one in a shootout with the police at a concert hall, the Bataclan, where gunmen methodically killed at least 80 people.
About 40 others died in apparently coordinated attacks outside the Stade de France, north of Paris, where the French and German national soccer teams were playing an exhibition match, and at four other places in the city.
About 300 people remained in Paris-area hospitals, at least 80 of them in critical condition and 177 in serious condition. The authorities said 53 people had been discharged from hospitals.
Paris: Morning After the Attacks
The streets of the French capital were quiet on the morning after the attacks that left at least 127 people dead and 300 wounded.
By REUTERS on November 14, 2015. Watch in Times Video »
At the Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou in western Paris, about 40 people were in surgery as of the early afternoon. Julien Ribes, 33, was at the hospital to search for his friend, who was at the concert hall. “I’m in total shock,” he said.
At the Town Hall for the 11th Arrondissement in Paris, Delphine de Peretti, 35, said she learned early Saturday afternoon that her sister Aurélie, who was at the Bataclan, had been killed. The family had been frantically trying to reach Aurélie all night.
“They told us my sister was dead, but they did not let us see her,” she said. “They said they still have to do some medical analysis. I am like a robot. I don’t know what to do next. I have not watched the news or slept since last night.”
The death toll far surpassed that of a massacre by Islamist extremists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and related attacks around the French capital in January. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people. And it prompted Mr. Hollande to pronounce France’s first state of emergency since 2005, when riots rocked downtrodden urban areas across the country.
World Leaders Voice Support For France
International leaders condemned terrorism and vowed to stand by France the day after the deadly attacks in Paris.
By REUTERS on November 14, 2015. Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images.Watch in Times Video »
Parisians were left struggling to make sense of their new reality. Parents whose children slept through the ordeal were facing the delicate task of trying to explain what had happened, and why so many planned activities had been canceled and public spaces were closed.
On the Champ de Mars, at the base of the Eiffel Tower and along the pedestrian promenade that hugs the Left Bank of the Seine, joggers and cyclists tried to carry on with their Saturday routines.
Pausing from her morning run near the Musée d’Orsay, Marie-Caroline de Richemont, 32, said she was still trying to process the events, but without succumbing to fear. “This is not Iraq or Afghanistan,” she said. “We are not at war here. We need to stay confident and hopeful.”
Bertrand Bourgeois, 42, an accountant, was lost in thought as he cast a fishing line beneath the Invalides bridge.
Attacks in Central Paris
David Ramos/Getty Images
He normally avoids fishing in Paris, he said, preferring quieter sections of the Seine near his home in Poissy, a northwest suburb. But after the violence, he said he felt drawn to come into the city out of a sense of solidarity.
Although his wife asked him to stay home, “something in me felt like it was important to be here, to say ‘still alive,’ ” Mr. Bourgeois said.
“I feel sickened, angry,” he said. Coming so soon after the attacks in January, he said, “It is starting to be too much.”
On the Champs-Élysées, rows of Christmas market stalls stood shuttered. Several vendors stood idly, awaiting word about whether they would be allowed to open for business, while clutches of heavily armed police officers patrolled the largely empty sidewalks of one of Europe’s most famed avenues.
At Charles de Gaulle Airport, it took two and a half hours for some passengers arriving Saturday morning to reach passport control. Some passengers who had arrived on overnight flights learned what had happened only when they switched on their devices; many read the news in a state of stunned silence.
Pope Francis joined a chorus of world leaders — including the heads of government of Belgium, Burundi, Canada, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Spain and the United States — who have condemned the attacks.
“There is no justification for such things, neither religious nor human, this is not human,” Francis said in a telephone call to TV2000, the television station of the Italian Episcopal Conference. “It is difficult to understand such things, done by human beings,” he added, clearly moved. Francis said he was close to and was praying for the families of the victims, for France “and for all those who suffer.”
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