An unarmed populace has to shelter in place.
Via The Mirror
Survivors of the kosher grocery siege told how 30 cowered together in a shop freezer as gunman Amedy Coulibaly terrorised his hostages.
Petrified that they would be discovered and hauled out and executed, they shivered in silence for five hours.
Father-of-four Johan Dorre, 36, was able to call a friend on his mobile to tell him they were trapped two floors below ground. Then as the siege unfolded he called his uncle.
Jacob Katorza said: “My nephew Johan and the others were terrified that they would be discovered by the terrorists and were forced to huddle together like frightened animals to avoid hypothermia.
“He was shopping for the kosher cakes and meat delicacies which we Jewish people enjoy on the Holy Day when he heard shots being fired above on the ground floor and immediately took cover with other shoppers in the basement.
“Johan was to speak to my brother Haim by phone for only two or three minutes and told him to stay quiet and wait until help arrived. Then we just stood at the barriers for five hours and waited for news.
“It was absolutely terrible – the longest five hours of my life.[…]
Fifteen hostages were eventually freed alive and four died at Porte de Vincennes.
Schools, supermarkets, synagogues and kosher restaurants in the eastern area of Paris were in lock-down as it was swamped by police and emergency services.
At the print works in Dammartin-en-Goele, north-east of the capital, one client had a narrow escape after shaking hands with one of the Kouachi terrorist brothers.
The salesman, Didier, told how he greeted him warmly thinking he was a police officer. He said: “I shook hands with a terrorist.”
The man in black, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, told him: “Leave, we don’t kill civilians anyhow.”
Didier added: “That really struck me.
“So I decided to call the police. I guess it was one of the terrorists. It could have been a policeman if he hadn’t told me ‘we don’t kill civilians’. They were heavily armed like elite police. I didn’t know it was a hostage situation, or robbery. I just knew something wasn’t right.”
HT GetAClue