Paris under Attack - November 13 2015 (also Munich, July 2016)

http://www.nytimes.com/live/paris-attacks-live-updates/

Shooting underway in Les Halles, apparently...

thanks for making a thread, didn't have the courage, felt strange

man at bataclan has explosives

can nearby ilxors weigh in if they can? US media is getting chaotic updates.

ilx peeps all accounted for/safe?

Hostages taken at Eagles of Death Metal show

I don't know, I'm speaking with my cousin and a bunch of friends and they are as confused as everyone. There is that much information you can handle at the time.

Source for les Halles and Bataclan info above?

Seriously hoping Les Halles' report is a hoax.

Europe 1 radio for les Halles.

Source for les Halles and Bataclan info above?

French 24

For the explosives at the Bataclan, it's reported by Libération (as solid as it gets)

French 24 just reported “more than 50 dead.”

sympathies/best wishes. hoping french ilxors are safe. i'm afraid to turn the news off lest things get worse. it feels like i have control or something if i stay tuned.

Just turned on CNN, “we don’t know if the Eagles of Death (sic) were targeted.” Um, OK.

lemonde.fr is down.

they are reporting as much as they can from their fb page.

Journalist Thibau Lefevre just told radio station France Inter that a policeman talking in his walkie talkie said they were looking for suspects near Parmentier and République.

Both of these areas are between the sites of the two attacks in the city - the former to the west and the latter to the east. That whole part of the city is popular with people out on nights out.
Another witness, who was at the Batalclan with his mother, is currently in tears live on the radio station. He says he heard the assailants were screaming “Allahu Akbar” while shooting inside the crowd.

This is beyond scary

Up to 60 dead being reported now

when will this ever stop

i'm so discouraged

my brother in law is in Paris for work, just got word he's okay, whew

sincerely hope this is bullshit but:

katya adler ‏@BBCkatyaadler 3m3 minutes ago

UNCONFIRMED reports from inside Bataclan concert hall of "young" gunmen "calmly" firing at hostages #parisattacks

Bataclan hostages released supposedly. follow @andrewhistorian for more.
on twitter.

can't help but just feel thankful dad no longer works in paris/france

yeah i smell bullshit on that nickb, there was this weird fb post and no one knows if it's a fake or not.

it's just so hard to parse signal from noise

Not confirmed but seeing this from a number of folks:

Peter Allen ‏@peterallenparis 3m3 minutes ago
Louvre, Pompidou Centre & Les Halles shopping centre now being targeted in coordinated Paris attacks. City streets emptying of civilians..

still my best feed for info at the moment, if you know a bit of french: http://www.liberation.fr/direct/

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2015/11/eagles_of_death_12.html

that 404s.

http://www.liberation.fr/france/2015/11/13/fusillade-dans-le-10e-arrondissement-de-paris_1413313

xp

text from that link:
"French band Red Lemons posted the following to Facebook:

Pour rassurer les personnes qui nous savaient au concert des Eagles of death metal au bataclan, il y a eu un attentat, nous allons bien.

For our american and english friends, a terrorist attack happened at the Eagles of death metal concert. We are safe. Mikel Ross, Eric McFadden we were with your mates Jesse, Tuesday, the other musicians outside, they're safe too, they took a cab.
Fuck...

"Tuesday" likely refers to Jesse's partner Tuesday Cross. According to Google translate, that first sentence means "To reassure people who knew us in concert Eagles of death metal to [Bataclan], there was an attack , we're fine ."

thanks xp

There were two opening bands -- it's not clear if the Austrian band White Miles has gotten out or not.

Dude on CNN keeps saying ISIS with no evidence.

Borders closed.

borders closed?

yup, the entire French borders are closed. state of emergency.

Hollande declared 'we know where the attacks come from'

O RLY

i doubt they come from the Orly Airport.

sorry, I needed a pun. going to eat and disconnect a bit, t'was a lot.

ugh, this is a nightmare. i'm so sorry for all the ilxors and their friends/family who are nearby. just awful. :(

major update: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/11/13/multiple-deaths-reported-after-shootings-explosions-paris/75727746/

france radio saying a total of 5 or 6 places were attacked simultaneously

i can't even imagine being caught in les halles - that place is a giant underground maze

this is the kind of terrorist attack i fear the most, in a mall or a concert venue or a marketplace.

as opposed to the ones that take place in empty fields?

well as opposed to like airplanes i mean, or more symbolic political targets.

this is the kind of terrorist attack i fear the most, in a mall or a concert venue or a marketplace.

― nomar, Friday, November 13, 2015 11:09 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as opposed to the ones that take place in empty fields?

Yeah, an attack while seeing a show at a place like Bataclan:
http://a397.idata.over-blog.com/600x383/3/71/35/17/album-6/gotye-bataclan-42.jpg

The translation is pretty good; it is, however, very hard to tell who is yelling what. Shooter's accent (if that is him) is of a native speaker, not a Munich local.

x-post: well, they're saying there is now no indication ("aktuell" = at present).

> the 'silver lining' here is that maybe germany and france will be more motivated to deal with syria

Remember, Sarkozy was the one who pushed the West into intervening in Libya. European states don't have much more finesse dealing with the core Mid East problems of corrupt governments, overpopulation, youth unemployment, food insecurity, and radical ideologies that appeal to the disenfranchised. All the state tools are hammers.

The only silver lining is for the political right in those countries.

now 8 dead.

how fucked up is it that every time there's a mass killing i a pray it's not a muslim

there seems to be video evidence of one of the guys saying "i'm german" and "fuck foreigners" so i'd be surprised if it turned out to be a muslim.

boris is happy to blame islamists:

Speaking at the United Nations in New York, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, has said:

Everybody is shocked and saddened by what has taken place. Our thoughts are very much with the victims, their families, with the people of Munich, and the people of Germany more widely.

If, as seems very likely, this is another terrorist incident, then I think it proves once again that we have a global phenomenon now and a global sickness that we have to tackle both at source – in the areas where the cancer is being incubated in the middle east – and also of course around the world.

NO, Treeship, there is not. It appears that the shooter says "I'm German" after a bystander yells "fucking foreigner" at him.

oh, sorry

A body was just found at the scene: police unsure if victim or perp.

Have been very tense about a friend of mine who lives near the stadium and I just heard from her.

https://cdn3.iconfinder.com/data/icons/business-vol-2-1/512/Like_Thumbs_Up-128.png

had to google 'Breivik' tho of course i remember the event

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 22, 2016 9:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ fp'd

Word for word something Trump would say though, so suppose you are excused....

Thats great news TWU. Just got a call from a friend of mine there too, she's safe. Been trying for hours but apparently, and that's not v unusual, networks were down for quite some time.

CNN saying Munich authorities stating the shooters had/have "Islamist connections".

They've now removed any references to "Islamist" from their site and are quoting police as saying it resembles a "terror attack"
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/22/europe/germany-munich-shooting/index.html

Fuck CNN imo

Lone gunman, killed himself.

had to google 'Breivik' tho of course i remember the event

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 22, 2016 9:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ fp'd

― Le Bateau Ivre, Friday, July 22, 2016 5:03 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wtf lbi

ilx was originally founded as a puritan colony and sometimes these mostly vestigial persecution tendencies rise to the surface

Le Bateau Ivre, do you know how many mass killers we've had in our country since then? do you know how much new info people over 50 retain month to month?

that's a good way, treesh, to point out the board should be called I Love Witch Hunts.

The body I posted about was the shooter: 18-year-old kid living with his parents, dual German and Iranian citizenship (which almost certainly means German-born and that his parents are German citizens), no police record, shot himself. 9 killed, 16 injured.

grim lols

"ich bin deutscher!"
"du bist ein wichser bist du!"

It's unclear when the shooter killed himself but the Munich authorities appear to have reacted extremely well and extremely decisively to lock the city down and prevent any worse loss of life. They also appear to be making statements that will make it harder for IS to try and claim responsibility after the fact.

yeah there's been a lot of acclaim for the police - not blocking press questions with prepared lines, well organised and calm.

'No indication whatsoever' of links to IS, according to German police.

Not bellowing on about being at war is refreshing as well.

Seem to be stressing a brevik link atm.

Just going from German-language sources and the press conference:

It was a "classic running amok" of a single perp.
The perp was 18, in school, born and raised in Munich; he had a German and an Iranian passport.
The police have some information that he was mentally ill, but have not confirmed it.
He committed suicide.
There was no suicide note.
No indication of any IS links have been found; the police do not yet have any information about his religious beliefs.
Police found books about mass shootings in his residence; he appeared to have done a lot of research about them.
The shooting did take place on the 5th anniversary of the Breivik shooting.
He had 300 pieces of ammo with him.
He used a 9mm Glock, which he did not legally acquire.
He may have hacked someone's Facebook account to lure people to McDonald's. All the details are not yet known, but there's a fair amount of evidence that this is so.
All of the victims were from Munich or nearby.
The victims were 3 14-year-olds, 2 15-year-olds, and 17, 19, 20, and 45-years-old. Three of the people killed were female.
27 People were injured (including the Innenstadt), 10 seriously.

Thanks for that twu

i don't know why this should be but the fact that most of the victims were kids just guts me

me too. I assume the "i don't know why this should be" is appealing to the "nothing should shock you after Newtown" logic? But I think that logic is usually applied to a "how can things ever change after they didn't change after Newtown" defeatism. We will still always be gutted when it's kids and for good reason.

obviously, Utøya can substitute for Newtown in there

sounds like this may have been something personal, if the bit about hacking an individual's Facebook to lure people to a particular location is true. it seems like a very specifically targeted thing rather than a random spree thing.

Police have said there is some indication that he was a victim of "mobbing" (which is German for group psychological bullying) by his peers; they will be looking into that. His only police contact was as the victim of a group assault -- charges were not filed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/26/men-hostages-french-church-police-normandy-saint-etienne-du-rouvray

I don't even know where to put this. Stories like this just keep coming, how many in the last week now?

About one a day

this paragraph is pretty chilling

According to BFMTV, one of the two killers, as yet unnamed, lived in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray and had tried to travel to fight in Syria in 2015 but had been sent back by Turkish border authorities and jailed in France. He was released in March this year despite the protests of prosecutors, had an electronic tag that allowed authorities to monitor his movements, and was ordered to live at his parents’ home - near the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray - where the court ordered he was only allowed out between 8.30am and 12.30pm.

Interesting piece on the environment out of which the attackers emerged, police failings and so on: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mitchprothero/why-europe-cant-find-the-jihadis-in-its-midst?utm_term=.akmVrozg3#.uqB8wg1m4

That's a good article. This one is good too, focused on the connections between drugs and terrorism in France

https://www.opendemocracy.net/drugpolicy/johann-hari/training-in-violence-connecting-line-between-france-war-on-drugs-and-jihadism

Who wrote it?

The one I posted, Johann Hari.

Yes, but who really wrote it?

Hah

Yeah I saw that about him. Still seems like a good article on the situation over here.

Reports of an explosion and gunshots at Notre Dame.

Sounds like a man attacked a police officer with a hammer and was shot.

yup, so it seems. I'm near luxembourg garden and I've heard many police sirens.

Police van rammed, suspect dead

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40332532

Sounds like there was a small explosion and a suspect shot dead in Brussels a few minutes ago.