Ait Kamel (28) had just left a friend’s apartment in Saint-Denis, north of central Paris, and was passing a KFC on rue de la République when he heard the first shots.
“There was three minutes of constant firing,” he recalled, “then it stopped for five minutes and started again.”
It was 4.20am. More than 100 police commandos had taken up position on rue du Corbillon, a small street off rue de la République, not far from the town hall.
Snipers trained their rifles on the windows of a cream-coloured three-storey building that housed the Jules Guesde primary school and, above it, some run-down apartments. In the network of surrounding streets, police officers rushed to set up cordons.
A video taken by one resident named Ioan, a 32-year-old Romanian, shows police with helmets, shields and torches running along empty streets in the early-morning darkness, shouting at residents to stay indoors.
The target of the operation was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen who police believe was a key planner behind the co-ordinated massacres that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday night.
The authorities had initially thought Abaaoud was in Syria, where he has become one of the most prominent figures among the large French-speaking contingent in Islamic State (IS), but intelligence gathered in recent days – principally a telephone dropped in a bin outside the Bataclan music venue – led police to suspect he had slipped into France unnoticed.
Surveillance
Phone intercepts and witness accounts led the authorities to a woman, who was put under surveillance. She led the authorities to 8 rue du Corbillon in Saint-Denis, a multiethnic suburb about a kilometre from the Stade de France.
Suspecting Abaaoud was inside the building, police began to plan their intervention.
At 4.20am, having quietly taken up their positions under cover of darkness, a force of 110 masked officers from the elite Raid and BRI units moved in. But they immediately encountered an unexpected problem: the reinforced door withstood their initial explosive charge, giving the terrorists time to prepare their defence. When they finally burst into the building, a deafening gun battle echoed around the narrow streets.
“It was like the sound of fireworks,” said Adi (31) who was woken in his apartment on nearby rue Gabriel Péri by the cacophony.
“At one point there were three loud explosions. Boom! Boom! Boom! From the window you could see police, army, fire brigade. They were flying in like crazy,” he said.
“We could see bullets flying and laser beams out of the window. There were explosions. You could feel the whole building shake,” said Sabrine, a downstairs neighbour from the apartment that was raided.
She told Europe 1 radio she heard the people above her talking to each other, running around and reloading their guns.
First into the apartment was a police dog, Diesel, who was shot dead. Then, when police followed, they met heavy resistance. The firefight was ferocious, incessant and – for the neighbours – terrifying.
By now Saint-Denis was on lockdown, the suburban commuter town transformed into a war zone. Hundreds of armed police had taken up position, standing watch over metro stations and blocking access to the central streets along a 500m perimeter. A helicopter circled overhead, its light sweeping across the roofs around rue du Corbillon.
Urging residents not to leave their homes, Mayor Didier Paillard said schools would not open and public transport would be stopped. The local university told students and staff not to come in.
Among those watching from the cordon was Jawad Bendaoud, who told AFP he had just found out the suspects were holed up in his apartment.
"A friend asked me to put up two of his mates for a few days," he said, adding that he was told they had come from Belgium. "I didn't know they were terrorists." Before he could finish speaking, Bendaoud was taken away by police.
Two hours into the gunfight, sporadic automatic fire kept coming. So did the police reinforcements, who continued to pour in by the lorryload. At about 6.15am, the police noticed a woman near one of the windows of the apartment building.
A woman shouting
One eyewitness, Christian (20) described the moment to Le Parisien: "During a 10- or 15- minute lull in the shooting I heard a woman shouting: 'Help, help, help me!' The police asked her to identify herself and to show herself.
“She showed her hands but she didn’t reveal her face. She withdrew them and then put them up again several times. They shouted at her: ‘Keep your hands in the air!’ They told her: ‘We’re going to shoot.’
“The shooting resumed. The police were firing from the roof of the building opposite. Suddenly there was an enormous explosion [from the window, inside the flat]. It was probably the woman who blew herself up. The windows shattered. Lots of objects from the apartment were thrown into the street, pieces of human flesh as well. They are still there. You can see a bit of the head, of skin, of ribs.”
At 7.20am, after a lull of more than an hour, intense gunfire resumed, followed by at least four loud explosions.
Witnesses described hearing another three explosions, similar to grenade blasts, coming from the building at 7.35am. At this point police brought about 20 people living in the building to safety in a makeshift shelter in the local hall.
Tense mood
Meanwhile, the army had taken up positions across the area. In surrounding streets, as people began to emerge from their homes, the mood was tense.
“Stop! Reverse!” soldiers yelled at drivers who came too close. Every time pedestrians moved even a few steps beyond the cordon, police reached for their guns.
“I’m afraid,” said Hanane, a mother of three who was feeding her baby girl in a nearby apartment when she heard the first explosions.
By 8.30am the heavy fighting was over, although police had yet to secure the building. News began to filter out: a woman suspected of being Abaaoud’s cousin had blown herself up – she was the first female suicide bomber in France – and a unidentified man had been killed by a grenade.
A total of eight arrests were made. Three men were detained inside the apartment, two men and a woman were arrested nearby and two more people were brought in for questioning after they were found hiding in the rubble at 10.30am.
Five police officers were injured in the assault. Abaaoud is not among those arrested, but police would not confirm last night whether he was among the dead.
“The identity of those arrested is being checked. Everything will be done to determine who is who,” said Paris prosecutor François Molins.
Standing alongside Molins at the scene, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised the security forces for operating "under fire for a number of hours in conditions that we have never seen before today".
At 11.35am police confirmed that the seven-hour siege was over. By then the police alone had fired 5,000 rounds and the building was close to collapse.
As teams of forensics specialists arrived, a cavalcade of more than a dozen vans filled with masked police left the scene and sped back towards central Paris, sirens blaring.
