Attackers would not stop shooting at people, say witnesses

An eyewitness tells AFP that the attackers at the Bataclan theater hall said “it’s Hollande’s fault, he shouldn’t interfere in Syria” before opening fire at the crowd gathered for a concert Friday night.

I was at the concert with my sister and my friends. We were upstairs near the stands. This was maybe an hour into the Eagles of Death Metal concert. We heard gunfire below. At first, we thought maybe it was part of the show, but we quickly understood that it wasn’t,” says Pierre Janaszak, 35, a radio and TV host.

“They were three [people], I think and they shot right at people. They had huge rifles, I imagine it was AK-47s, it made a hell of a racket. They would not stop shooting,” he says.

There were bodies and blood everywhere, he says.

Janaszak says he and a few others hid in a toilet but could hear the attackers below speaking to hostages.

“I very clearly heard them say that it was Hollande’s fault, their president’s fault, and that he shouldn’t intervene in Syria. They also spoke about Iraq,” he says.

Another witness, who gave her first name to the New York Times as Yasmine says: “I saw these two crazy guys arrive, they started firing on everybody.”

“They said ‘What you are doing in Syria, you are going to pay for it now,” she recounts.