A woman wearing a scarf in the tri-colours of the French national flag arrives to pay her respects yesterday at the Bataclan theatre in Paris.
DPA
Paris
The French tricolour hung solemnly from the balconies and windows along misty Parisian streets yesterday as some 2,000 people gathered at the city’s military museum to pay homage to the victims of the November 13 terrorist attacks. In a mid-morning ceremony, the names and ages of the 130 victims of the attacks were read aloud.
They were killed when a group of terrorists attacked a national stadium, a concert hall and a string of bars and restaurants on a Friday evening two weeks ago.
Many of the deaths occurred at the Bataclan music hall, where people were gathered for a rock concert, and on the crowded terraces of restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissments near the Boulevard Voltaire and the popular Canal St Martin.
The victims included an architect, photographer, television programme editor, students, musicians, a lawyer, and many others from some 20 different countries.
While many were young – the average age of the victims was 35 – there were also couples and parents.
“They represented life, and because they represented life, they were killed,” said French President Francois Hollande. “They were beaten down because they represented France. They were massacred because they represented liberty.”
“They were the youth of France, the youth of a free people who love culture. This was the music that was unbearable to the terrorist. This is the joy that they want to bury with the explosions of their bombs. To respond, we will multiply the songs, the concerts; we will continue going to the stadium,” he said.
Family members of the victims were present in the courtyard of the Invalides museum and war veterans complex, as photographs of their loved ones flashed across a distant screen.
Some of the people wounded in the attacks were also present, a few still attended by medical personnel as they lay covered in blankets in hospital gurneys or bundled in wheelchairs.
Hollande began the ceremony with a moment of silence after standing at attention to a military band playing La Marseillaise national anthem.
Singers Nolwenn Leroy, Camelia Jordana et Yael Naim sang a rendition of Quand on a que l’amour (When Love Is All You Have) followed by Natalie Dessay singing Perlimpinpin – both French classics.
During a brief speech, Hollande called for tolerance and said the country would not succumb to fear or hatred.
“The terrorists want to divide us, to make us oppose one another, to pit us against one another. They will fail.”
But he also promised to destroy the “army of fanatics that committed these crimes”, saying that France had been the target of an act of war planned from afar.
In the past weeks, France has sharply ramped up its military efforts against the Islamic State (IS), which claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Investigators are also trying to track down accomplices of the attackers and one suspect, Salah Abdeslam, who is still at large.
The Belgian authorities are also involved, as many of the perpetrators had links to that country.
Yesterday Belgian prosecutors extended the detention by a month of two suspects, including Ali O, a Frenchman living in Brussels who gave a car ride to Abdeslam after the attacks.
Ali O’s lawyer said his client had received a telephone call around 1pm (1200 GMT) on November 14 asking him to pick up a friend from a metro station on the outskirts of Brussels.
He had driven Abdeslam to the Brussels suburb of Schaerbeek, stopping en route at a cafe, the defence lawyer said, adding that Ali O was shocked when Abdeslam, a childhood friend, told him that Abdeslam’s brother Brahim had killed people before blowing himself up in Paris.
One other suspect detained in Brussels the previous day was placed under arrest yesterday and charged with terrorist attacks, bringing the total number of arrests in Belgium to six.
Two other people apprehended on Thursday during a raid in the eastern city of Verviers were released.
Belga news agency reported that they were the father and son of the man detained in Brussels who is being kept in custody.
