Disbelief, panic as Paris struck a second time

It should have been a Friday night like any other in central Paris, with locals and visitors alike watching a show, enjoying a meal or shrugging off the cares of the week over a drink. But for the second time in less than a year, France and the world are asking how carnage could strike at the heart of this much-loved city, including at a concert hall barely a few hundred steps from January’s deadly attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

“As we went to our car we saw dozens of people running out of the Bataclan,” local resident Caterina Gia-rdino, an Italian national, said of the 19th century theatre-turned-music venue w-here gunman clad in black systematically killed nearly 100. “Many of them were covered with blood, people were screaming,” she adde-d, sitting on a bench with a friend as she recalled how one young man emerged from the concert hall with the bloody imprint of a hand on his shirt.

The exact sequence of gun and bomb assaults on the concert hall, a sports stadium and restaurants in the French capital that left at least 120 dead is still unclear.

The first blast was heard at 9.17 p.m. (2017 GMT) outside the Stade de France national sports stadium, where France and Germany were playing a friendly soccer international in the presence of President Francois Hollande. Specta-tors distinctly heard a second detonation about two minutes later.

Inside the hall, California-based rock band Eagles of Death Metal were on stage promoting their fourth album when the audience began to notice something was not right.

“I turned round and I saw one of these attackers, he was very young, barely 20, with a small beard,” Julien Pearce, a reporter for Europe 1 radio who was in the theater said.

One witness speaking to French radio, said the dead and wounded dropped “like flies” and that “there was blood everywhere. You feel very alone in moments like that.”