By ADAM NOSSITER and RICK GLADSTONENOV. 13, 2015
PARIS — The Paris area reeled Friday night from a shooting rampage, explosions and mass hostage-taking that President François Hollande
called an unprecedented terrorist attack on France. His government
announced sharply increased border controls and heightened police powers
as it mobilized the military in a national emergency.
French
television and news services quoted the police as saying that around
100 people had been killed at a concert site where hostages had been
held during a two-hour standoff with the police, and that perhaps dozens
of others had been killed in apparently coordinated attacks outside the
country’s main sports stadium and four other popular locations in the
city. But estimates on the total number of dead varied.
Witnesses
on French television said the scene at the concert hall, which can seat
as many as 1,500 people, was a massacre, describing how gunmen with
automatic weapons shot bursts of bullets into the crowd.
Ambulances
were seen racing back and forth in the area into the early hours of
Saturday, and hundreds of survivors were evacuated in police buses.
French television said Paris hospitals were overwhelmed with wounded.
On the Boulevard Beaumarchais, there
was shock on Friday over a siege at a concert hall that took place a
short distance from the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January.
News
agencies quoted Michel Cadot, head of the Paris police, as saying early
Saturday that all the assailants involved in shootings or bombings were
believed to be dead, and the Paris prosecutor’s office said that eight
attackers were dead, according to The Associated Press.
But the total number involved in the attacks, including accomplices still at large, remained unclear.
“We
are going to try and determine what happened, determine what the
profiles of these terrorists are, find out what their course of action
was, find out if there are still accomplices or co-attackers,” said
François Molins, the public prosecutor for Paris.
The
casualties eclipsed by far the deaths in Paris during the massacre at
the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and related assaults around the
French capital by Islamic militant extremists less than a year ago.
Those
attacks traumatized France and other countries in Europe, elevating
fears of religious extremism and violent jihadists who have been
radicalized by the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East
and North Africa.
An
explosion near the sports stadium, the Stade de France, which French
news services said was apparently a suicide bombing, occurred as the
German and French national teams were playing a soccer match, forcing a
hasty evacuation of Mr. Hollande. As the scope of the assaults quickly
became clear, he convened an emergency cabinet meeting and announced
that France was placing severe restrictions on its border crossings.
“As
I speak, terrorist attacks of an unprecedented scale are taking place
in the Paris region,” he said in a nationally televised address. “There
are several dozen dead, lots more wounded. It’s horrific.”
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