November 2015 Paris attacks

• 1. Introduction

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  The November 2015 Paris attacks killed 130 people in a single Friday night and injured another 416, almost 100 of them critically. No terrorist attack in French history had taken so many lives. Across the European Union, only the Madrid train bombings of 2004 had been deadlier.

  The violence was scattered across a stadium suburb, a run of crowded café terraces and a concert hall holding 1,500 people. Each place turned out to be one piece of a single coordinated plan.

  This documentary asks who built that plan and where it was put together. It asks how six separate attacks unfolded within a few hours, and how police finally ended a siege inside a theatre. And it asks what a country already braced for violence did next.

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• 2. A Country on Alert

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  France entered November 2015 already on high alert. In January, militants belonging to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, killing 17 people. Smaller incidents followed through the year. In February, three soldiers guarding a Jewish community centre in Nice were stabbed. In June, there was an attempt to blow up a factory in Saint-Quentin Fallavier. In August, a shooting and stabbing attack took place on a passenger train.

  A week before the attacks, France had reinstated border checks. It had also increased security ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, due to open in Paris at the beginning of December.

  The Bataclan theatre had been threatened several times because of its support for Jewish organisations and Israel. Two Jewish brothers, Pascal and Joël Laloux, had owned it for more than 40 years before selling it in September 2015. Back in 2011, a group calling itself Army of Islam told French security services it had planned an attack on the Bataclan because of its owners.

  In the weeks before the Paris attacks, ISIL and its branches claimed other attacks. They claimed the downing of Metrojet Flight 9268 on the 31st of October and suicide bombings in Beirut on the 12th of November. Intelligence agencies in Turkey and Iraq had reportedly warned of an imminent attack on France months earlier. They said they heard nothing back until after the attacks. According to The Irish Times, a senior French security official said the country receives that kind of message "every day".

  The Paris cell was one of two the Islamic State sent into Europe in 2015.

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• 3. The Stadium Bombings

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  At 21:16, a first explosion shook the streets around the Stade de France, the national stadium in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis. Inside, France was playing Germany in an international friendly, and President François Hollande was among the spectators. Three blasts came that night, at 21:16, 21:19 and 21:53. They killed four people, three of them the bombers themselves.

  The attackers arrived slightly late, and two of them wore Bayern-Munich tracksuits as disguises. Eyewitnesses said they had no tickets, and security guards turned them away several times. The first bomber used the pseudonym Ahmad al-Mohammad. A guard patted him down at the entrance and found his explosive vest. Seconds later he detonated it outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander. Investigators later surmised that he had meant to set it off inside the stadium. A panicked crowd would then have poured into the streets where the other two bombers waited.

  Three minutes after that, the second bomber, who used the pseudonym M al-Mahmod, blew himself up outside another gate. He had repeatedly failed to find and enter a crowd. Thirty-four minutes later came the third blast, from the vest of Bilal Hadfi. Moments earlier, a woman met him in an alley, and he asked her for directions to a McDonald's restaurant. People were being evacuated from that restaurant as he detonated. Some reports say more than 50 people were injured there, seven seriously. Others say the bomb went off some distance from any discernible target.

  Hollande was evacuated from the stadium at half-time. Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, stayed in his seat. The president met his interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to coordinate a response. Two of the explosions were audible on the live television broadcast. French officials informed both coaches of the developing crisis, but players and fans were kept in the dark until the match ended. Hollande feared that the crowd outside could not be kept safe if the game stopped at once, so he let it continue without an announcement.

  Afterwards, fans were led onto the pitch to wait for evacuation while police watched every exit. The German team was advised not to return to its hotel, which had received a bomb threat earlier that day. The Germans spent the night in the stadium on mattresses, and the French players stayed with them in a show of camaraderie.

  Between the second and third blasts, gunmen in a rented SEAT León had already begun working through the 10th and 11th arrondissements.

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• 4. Terraces and Cafés

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  At about 21:25, three men stepped out of the rented SEAT León on the rue Bichat and the rue Alibert, near the Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. They were Belgian-Moroccan, and their ringleader was Abdelhamid Abaaoud. The others were Brahim Abdeslam and Chakib Akrouh. They first killed the driver of a car in front of them. Then they shot at people outside Le Carillon, a café and bar. After that they crossed the street and fired on people inside the restaurant Le Petit Cambodge.

  Thirteen people died at these two places, and ten others were critically injured. Doctors and nurses from the nearby Hôpital Saint-Louis happened to be inside Le Carillon, and they gave emergency help to the wounded. The gunmen fled in the SEAT León.

  At 21:32, the car pulled up outside Café Bonne Bière on the rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, close to the terrace of the Italian restaurant La Casa Nostra. The attackers opened fire on people enjoying the evening. Five were killed and eight injured. An eyewitness described a gunman firing in short bursts.

  At 21:36, the attackers reached the restaurant La Belle Équipe on the rue de Charonne in the 11th arrondissement. They fired for several minutes at its outdoor terrace, then drove away. Twenty-one people died there, and seven others were left in critical condition. At all of these targets, many of the dead had been sitting on outdoor terraces.

  At 21:40, Brahim Abdeslam was dropped off on the boulevard Voltaire, near the place de la Nation. He sat down at the interior terrace of the Comptoir Voltaire café, wearing a hooded jacket over several layers of clothing. After placing an order, he smiled at the patrons and apologised for interrupting their dinner. Then he detonated his vest, killing himself and injuring fifteen people, one of them seriously.

  A few hundred metres further along that same boulevard stood a concert hall where a rock band was in the middle of its set.

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• 5. Inside the Bataclan

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  Around 21:50, the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal was playing to about 1,500 people at the Bataclan theatre on the boulevard Voltaire. Outside, three gunmen had been waiting in a black rental car for more than an hour. They carried three different types of assault rifle. They were Foued Mohamed-Aggad, aged 23, Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, aged 29, and Samy Amimour, aged 28. All three were French natives of Algerian descent.

  The band was playing "Kiss the Devil" when the men left the car and shot three people outside. They then burst into the concert hall. At first the audience took the gunfire for pyrotechnics. The band ran offstage and escaped with many of the crew.

  Survivors described hundreds of people lying beside and on top of one another. The gunmen also fired up into the balconies, and bodies fell onto the stalls below. For a few minutes the hall was dark, lit only by flashes from the rifles. The attackers shouted that they were there because of French airstrikes against the Islamic State. One witness heard a gunman say, "This is because of all the harm done by Hollande to Muslims all over the world."

  A radio reporter at the concert called the attackers calm and determined. He said they reloaded three or four times, with one man giving covering fire while the others reloaded. Whenever they paused, some of the crowd ran for the emergency exits, scrambling over each other. Some were shot from behind, and the third gunman had positioned himself at an exit. Other people barricaded themselves in backstage rooms. Some smashed through the ceiling of an upstairs toilet and hid among the rafters. Those who could not run lay still, and survivors said the attackers walked among them and fired at anyone showing signs of life.

  Police Commissioner Guillaume Cardy, then deputy head of the night-time anti-crime brigade for the Paris area, arrived with his driver, a sergeant. They were among the first officers there. Knowing people were trapped inside, they went in through the front doors armed only with 9mm service pistols and light body armour. From the entrance they saw Samy Amimour holding a hostage at gunpoint beside the stage. They shot him six times at 21:57. As he fell, he detonated his explosives, and his hostage escaped. The other two gunmen then fired from the balconies, forcing the officers to take cover behind pillars. The Search and Intervention Brigade arrived at 22:15, soon followed by the elite RAID tactical unit.

  Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefaï took about twenty hostages and herded them into a room at the end of an L-shaped corridor. They seized the hostages' phones and tried to get online, but found no signal. Some hostages were made to look down into the hall and out of the windows and report what they saw. At 23:30, an elite police squad entered the building. Over the next 50 minutes, the two attackers had four phone exchanges with a police negotiator. They threatened to execute hostages unless they received a signed paper promising France's departure from Muslim lands.

  The police assault began at 00:20 and lasted three minutes. Officers launched it after reports that the attackers had started killing hostages. Using shields, police burst open the door and pulled the hostages one by one behind them. Most of the remaining hostages ran from Mostefaï in the chaos. Mohamed-Aggad dropped his rifle and detonated his vest at the top of the stairs. Mostefaï was fatally wounded, and police shot him again to stop him setting off his own vest. All of the hostages were rescued without injury.

  Ninety people died at the Bataclan, almost all within the first 20 minutes. Among them were a music critic of Les Inrockuptibles, an executive of Mercury Records France and the merchandise manager of Eagles of Death Metal.

  Police dog teams helped with the removal of the bodies because of fears of live explosives, and identification took 10 hours. Some audience members had left their identity papers in the theatre's cloakroom.

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• 6. Planners and Perpetrators

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  Three groups of three men carried out the attacks, wearing explosive vests and belts fitted with identical detonators. The Paris prosecutor said the vests used acetone peroxide as their explosive. Seven of the nine died at the scenes of their attacks. A tenth participant, Salah Abdeslam, drove the Stade de France bombers to the stadium. He was supposed to carry out a suicide bombing in the 18th arrondissement afterwards. He never did, and he disposed of his vest.

  On the 14th of November, ISIL claimed responsibility. Hollande called the attacks an act of war and said the group had organised them with help from inside France. The claimed motives were an ideological objection to Paris as a capital of abomination and perversion, retaliation for airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, and Hollande's foreign policy toward Muslims worldwide. Soon afterwards, ISIL's media arm, the Al-Hayat Media Group, launched a dark web site praising the organisation and recommending the encrypted messaging service Telegram. The day after the attacks, Fabien Clain released an audio recording claiming responsibility. Clain was a French veteran jihadist who had served five years in a French prison, from 2009 to 2014, for recruiting fighters to go to Syria.

  The attacks were planned in Syria and organised by a terrorist cell based in Belgium. French police reports on cellphones recovered from crime scenes showed that the attackers were being directed in real time from Brussels. Most of the attackers were born in France or Belgium, with Moroccan and Algerian backgrounds, and many had fought in Syria. Two were Iraqis. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said several had exploited Europe's immigration crisis to enter the continent undetected. In Greece, two ISIL militants who had accompanied two of the attackers, all posing as migrants, were arrested weeks before the attacks. A Syrian and an Egyptian passport were found near the bodies of two perpetrators. Egyptian authorities said their passport belonged to a victim, Aleed Abdel-Razzak, not to an attacker.

  French terrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard called the use of returning European citizens a change of paradigm. The Los Angeles Times reported that more than 3,000 Europeans had travelled to Syria to join ISIL and other radical groups.

  Michael Leiter, a former director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, said the attacks showed a sophistication not seen in a city attack since Mumbai in 2008. Mumbai Police Joint Commissioner Deven Bharti pointed to similarities: several targets, indiscriminate shooting and improvised explosive devices. One key difference, he said, was that the Mumbai attacks lasted several days. In Paris the attackers killed themselves once capture seemed near. Evidence suggested they had regularly used unencrypted communications while planning.

  By the 16th of November, investigators had settled on Abdelhamid Abaaoud as the plot's leader. He had escaped to Syria after being suspected in other plots in Belgium and France, including the thwarted 2015 Thalys train attack. He had recruited a wide network, including the brothers Brahim and Salah Abdeslam.

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• 7. Manhunt and Trial

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  Three cars turned up in Paris after the attacks. A grey Volkswagen Polo with Belgian plates was abandoned near the Bataclan. It had been hired by a French citizen living in Belgium, and it held a parking ticket from the town of Molenbeek. On the 15th of November, a SEAT was found in the suburb of Montreuil containing three Zastava M70 assault rifles, ammunition and three butcher knives. A Renault Clio hired by Salah Abdeslam was found near Montmartre with a butcher knife inside.

  On the 15th and the 16th of November, French tactical police raided over 200 locations. They arrested 23 people, seized weapons and placed another 104 people under house arrest. On the 17th, police followed a female cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud to a block of flats in Saint-Denis, where they saw him with her. The next day, police raided a flat there, and a gunfight lasted several hours. Abaaoud was killed. Chakib Akrouh, one of the restaurant shooters, died after detonating an explosive vest. Eight suspected militants were arrested. Jawad Bendaoud was arrested the same day for providing lodging to Abaaoud and two others. In September 2017 a judge filed for his trial on a charge of concealing terrorist criminals, which carried a maximum penalty of six years.

  Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Belgian citizen, was described by police as dangerous, and the public was told not to approach him. On the 21st of November, Belgium locked down Brussels, closing shops, schools and public transport. The alert level there rose to its highest, level four. On the 23rd, an explosive belt was found in a litter bin in the suburb of Montrouge. Phone records placed Abdeslam in Montrouge on the night of the attacks. His brother Mohamed was detained on the 14th of November and released after hours of questioning. He said he had never suspected his siblings of planning anything.

  On the 15th of March 2016, Belgian police raided a house in the Brussels suburb of Forest, and four officers were wounded. Three days later, a raid in Molenbeek ended with Salah Abdeslam among five people arrested. Mohamed Abrini, a 30-year-old suspected accomplice for whom Belgian prosecutors had issued a warrant on the 24th of November, was reportedly arrested on the 8th of April 2016.

  On the 8th of September 2021, the trial of 20 accused men opened in Paris, in a custom-designed chamber within the Palais de Justice. It was expected to hear more than 300 witnesses and victims and to last about nine months. Fourteen defendants were tried in person and six in absentia. The trial ended on the 29th of June 2022 with all 20 convicted. Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving assailant, received life without parole. Of his 19 co-defendants, 18 were convicted on terrorism-related charges and one on a lesser fraud charge.

  The trial was filmed, but the recording will not be released until fifty years after it ended.

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• 8. Aftermath and Memory

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  On the night of the attacks, President Hollande declared a state of emergency, the first in France since the 2005 riots. Borders were temporarily closed, 1,500 soldiers were called in to help police, and two contingency plans, the plan blanc and the plan rouge, were activated. On the 20th of November, the Senate extended the state of emergency by three months. Police gained powers to search without a warrant, to put anyone under house arrest without trial and to block websites encouraging terrorism. Public demonstrations were banned. The measure was extended until the end of July 2016, and further extensions followed after the attack in Nice on the 14th of July 2016. During the COP21 climate conference, from the 30th of November to the 12th of December 2015, demonstrations by environmental activists were prevented, while others were allowed.

  Daily life stopped in places that rarely stopped. Disneyland Paris, which had operated every day since opening in 1992, closed its parks. The Eiffel Tower, normally visited by 20,000 people a day, shut for two days. State schools and universities in Paris stayed closed, and U2, Foo Fighters, Motörhead and Coldplay cancelled performances in the city.

  On the 15th of November, French aircraft carried out the biggest airstrike so far of Opération Chammal, the bombing campaign against ISIL. Ten aircraft dropped 20 bombs on Raqqa, the city where ISIL was based. More strikes followed the next day on a command centre and a training camp. On the 18th of November, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle left Toulon for the eastern Mediterranean. That deployment had been decided before the attacks, but they sped it up. Army applications, which had run at 100 to 150 a day in 2014, rose to 1,500 in the week after the attacks.

  Parisians used the hashtag #portesouvertes, meaning "open doors", to offer shelter to people afraid to travel home. The Place de la République became a focal point of mourning, as it had in January. On the 15th of November, a memorial service was held at Notre Dame Cathedral, presided over by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois. On the 4th of December, Café Bonne Bière reopened under a banner reading "Je suis en terrasse", meaning "I'm on the Terrace". A street cleaner told France 24 that the city had removed six truckloads of wilted flowers from the memorials.

  Political campaigns went quiet for a time. All major parties suspended their regional election campaigns. On the 18th of November, Hollande reaffirmed that France would accept 30,000 Syrian refugees over two years, and French mayors gave him a standing ovation. Marine Le Pen of the National Front, meanwhile, campaigned for hardline security measures in the regional elections starting on the 6th of December. Elsewhere in Europe, Jean-Claude Juncker rejected calls to rethink migration policy and argued for a stronger display of liberal values. Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, rejected mandatory resettlement quotas. In the United States, at least 31 governors said they would refuse Syrian refugees.

  Survivors turned the night into testimony. Fred Dewilde, a French artist who was inside the Bataclan, published the graphic novel Mon Bataclan in October 2016. Documentarians Gédéon and Jules Naudet released November 13: Attack on Paris in 2018. In 2022, Cédric Jimenez directed the film November, starring Jean Dujardin, about the five days of investigation that followed. Dewilde died in May 2024, nine years after the attacks, having continued to depict his trauma in several graphic novels.

  In November 2025, ten years after the attacks, a memorial garden for the victims was inaugurated on Place Saint-Gervais, behind Paris City Hall. President Emmanuel Macron attended the ceremony. Victims' associations worked with the designers, and the garden carries references to the six main attack sites. Five months after it opened, about ten lanterns were knocked over, and anti-police and antisemitic graffiti was found.

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