Paris: 3 Teams of Attacks Carried Out Acts in City That Left at Least 129 Dead, Officials Say:
PARIS — The terrorist assault was carried out by three teams of Islamic State attackers in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who might have traveled on a Syrian passport in addition to the flow of migrants to Europe.
“It’s an action of war which was perpetrated by a terrorist military, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President Francois Hollande told the country from the Elysee Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It’s an action of war that was prepared, arranged and intended from abroad, with complicity from the interior, which the investigation will help create.”
As the death toll increased with 352 others injure — to 129, 99 of them critically — a fundamental timeline of the strikes came into view.
Francois Molins, the Paris prosecutor, said the attackers were equipped with assault rifles and suicide vests. One attacker there was killed; suicide vests detonated. In the hall, 89 individuals, who’d been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.
The guy together with the Syrian passport — which Greek officials said had been enrolled at the Aegean island of Leros on Oct. 3 — was 25, and expired at the arena. He had a criminal record and was considered to be involved in extremist Islamic ideology, Mr. Molins said. Officials said they had detained several of his relatives for question and later identified him as Ismael Omar Mostefai.
The search for potential accomplices of the terrorists got steam on Saturday. Officials in Belgium declared three arrests, one of them linked to a rental car located in Paris. In Germany, the authorities were investigating whether a guy his GPS navigator establish for Paris and they detained with weapons in his car was linked to the assaults. But it remained uncertain how a scheme of such sophistication and lethality might have escaped the notice of intelligence agencies in France and abroad.
France stayed under a national state of emergency.
Mr. Hollande vowed to “be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” including that France would act within the law but with “all the essential means, and on all terrains, inside and exterior, in coordination with our friends, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”
The chance the Islamic State was to attribute, as well as the strikes, guaranteed to further traumatize other European nations and France already afraid of violent jihadists radicalized by the battles in Syria and elsewhere.
The chance that one of the attackers was a migrant or had posed as one will further complicate the vexing issue for Europe of the best way to deal with people’s unceasing flow from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. It might also add weight to the xenophobic arguments of right wing populists like Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party, who on Saturday held a news conference to declare that “France as well as the French are no longer safe.”
Mr. Hollande actively stepped up French involvement in the military air effort in Syria at the end of September. Last week, France assaulted petroleum operations in Syria under the management of the Islamic State.
The danger of the Islamic State, as well as the strikes, will likely command a summit meeting of leaders of the Group of 20 countries that begins on Sunday in Turkey.
Paris, hit by shock and despair, stayed in a state of lockdown, with public institutions — schools, museums, libraries, pools, food markets — shut and public transportation hobbled. Charles de Gaulle Airport stayed open, but with considerable delays because of luggage tests and tighter passport.
The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, said he’d celebrate a Mass in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame for the sufferers, their families and France on Sunday.
At the Hopital Europeen Georges-Pompidou in Paris that is west, about 40 individuals were in operation as of the early day. Julien Ribes, 33, was at the hospital to look because of his buddy. “I am in complete shock,” he said.
The family had been urgently attempting to reach Aurelie all night.
“They said they still need to do some medical evaluation. I’m like a robot. I do not understand what to do.
The death toll much surpassed that of a massacre in associated attacks by Islamic extremists round the French capital in January and the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. Friday’s attacks were the deadliest in Europe since.
Parisians were left fighting to make sense of their new reality. Parents whose kids slept through the ordeal were confronting the challenging job of attempting to describe why so many planned actions had been deleted, and what had occurred and public spaces were closed.
In the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, on the Champ de Mars and along the pedestrian promenade that embraces the Left Bank of the Seine, cyclists and joggers attempted to carry on with their Saturday routines.
Stopping from her morning run close to the Musee d’Orsay, Marie-Caroline de Richemont, 32, said she was attempting to process the events, only without succumbing to worry. “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan,” she said. “We’re not at war here. We have to remain confident and optimistic.”
He generally prevents fishing in Paris, he said, favoring more quiet sections of the Seine near his house in Poissy, a northwest suburb.
“I feel sickened, mad,” he said. Coming so soon after the strikes in January, he said, “it’s beginning to be too much.”
On the Champs Elysees, rows of Christmas marketplace booths stood shuttered. Several sellers stood idly, expecting word about whether they’d be permitted to open for business, while clutches of heavily armed police officers patrolled the mostly empty pavements of one of the most famous ave in Europe.
For some passengers arriving Saturday morning, Charles de Gaulle Airport took two plus a half hours at it. Some passengers who’d arrived on overnight flights discovered what had occurred only when they switched on their apparatus; the news is read by many in a state of stunned silence.
“There is not any reason for such matters, neither spiritual nor human, this really isn’t human,” Francis said in a telephone call to TV2000, the television station of the Italian Episcopal Conference. “It’s hard to comprehend such matters, done by human beings,” he added, certainly went. Francis said he was praying for the families of the casualties, for France “and for everyone who endure.”
“We, your German friends, free people are so close with you,” said Ms. Merkel, dressed in black. “Free people are weeping with you. Jointly with you, free people will fight against those who’ve carried out such an unfathomable action against you.”
“And they met with killers who despise this life of liberty.”
Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry and other top diplomats in Vienna on Saturday to talk about the continuing disaster in Syria, said the attacks emphasized the urgency of the discussions. “It’s more crucial than ever in the current position to organize the international fight against terrorism,” Secretary said.
The F.B.I. will send a team of representatives to Paris to help with the investigation, law enforcement officials said.
The F.B.I. is already greatly focused on the risk from Americans inspired by the militant group. The government had so many individuals under surveillance in those cases that, representatives were pulled by this spring, officials off other cases to help track them.
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