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PARIS. Suddenly I heard a terrible cry: it seemed to have no end. Albert, in his sixties, still trembles at the memory. He lives behind the Richard-Lenoir metro station. And he counts the few moments that plunged him back into yesterday’s nightmare. I looked outside. I’ve seen people running everywhere, the police. I immediately thought of Charlie Hebdo. In front of his palace, in a shameless white building, five years ago was the writing of the satirical weekly. On January 7, 2015, the Kouachi brothers murdered eleven people with Kalachnikovs, those artists who had dared to publish the Muhammad cartoons.
Yesterday, an 18-year-old young man of Pakistani origin, Ali H, who had been in Paris for three years, returned to that street, rue Nicolas-Appert, perhaps to take revenge, with a butcher knife in his hand. He was enraged by two young people who work at Première Ligne, a television production company, which is now in the same building as then. A fury: those who have seen it have noticed the eyes that looked away, perhaps drugged, outside of themselves. A barrage of stabs. And blood, again blood.
Première Ligne produces investigative journalism programs, such as Cash Investigation, hosted by Elise Lucet, one of the stars of public television. They were the neighbors of Charlie Hebdo that terrible January 7 five years ago: the first to enter their offices, reduced to a bloodbath, to help the rare survivors. They stayed there, in that building. The memory of the attack has never left them. “In the corridors of Première Ligne we have the portraits of the eleven fallen from the weekly – Lucet said yesterday, on television, after the new attack -. We will never forget them. “Even more so now that the trial against the accomplices of the Kouachi brothers is being held. Well, yesterday, at 11:45 am, two young people from the production company went out to smoke a cigarette. That ritual, like always, it is performed in front of a large fresco, portraying the eleven victims of Charlie Hebdo. Yes, never forget it.
One of his companions, who stayed upstairs, heard screams. “I looked out the window,” she says. I saw my friend already full of blood and the young man running after him brandishing a knife. Soon after, David, as he exited the subway, noticed the bloody knife, lying on a patch of grass next to it. And then the body of a young man lying: blood on his face, on his chest, torn and damp jeans, the water from the showers that fell from a heavy leaden sky. Until that moment, apart from the heart-rending screams of the two victims, everything had been accomplished in deafening silence: no “Allah Akhbar” thrown into the air, no justification for the agony. Both the young man and his colleague were rescued: seriously injured, not risking their lives. Meanwhile, the attacker fled. Someone has gone after him with metal bars in hand. A black padded jacket and red sneakers, he might have looked like one of the many young men who crawl to this part of Paris at noon. But there were traces of blood on the clothes. Panting, the police caught up with him at the Opéra on the Place de la Bastille, on that rain-glistening staircase. Meanwhile, one of his alleged accomplices had been detained in the corridors of the metro station, next to the scene of the attack.
Around Richard-Lenoir Boulevard the streets were emptied and children and young people were confined to schools: after five years the same nightmare returned. An icy atmosphere. In the evening, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced the arrest of another five people: “It is an act of Islamist terrorism.” The police ransacked apartments in the Saint-Denis area, one of which was allegedly being used by the young attacker.
On the web, however, the tweets were chasing each other. “How many victims would have been avoided by controlling our immigration policy and proceeding with systematic expulsions of illegal immigrants? Political cowardice is no longer possible! ”, Marine Le Pen would publish.
“It is political indecency that is no longer possible – replied Pierre Person, a macronist deputy from the eleventh district of Paris, where the attack took place -. The blood has not dried yet and is already spitting its own poison. Neither the inhabitants of our district nor those of France need your hatred.
