Charlie Hebdo: ‘People were on the floor, huddled, sobbing’

A French journalist who was among the first to enter the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday has described the scene as being like something from a "war zone".

Edouard Perrin was at his desk in the offices of the TV production company Premières Lignes Télévision, in the same building as the satirical magazine, when he heard two loud noises. "I didn't think they were shots at the time," he told The Irish Times yesterday. "Then a staff member came in and said there were guys in the building with Kalashnikovs."

The French reporter knew that Charlie Hebdo had been threatened and that its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, who died in the attack, was under police protection. "I knew straight away that Charlie Hebdo had been attacked. They were clearly a target."

The offices of Premières Lignes Télévision are on the second and third floor of the building, with an interior staircase and access to the roof. Charlie Hebdo is on the second floor, across the corridor from the TV company.

Perrin had worked for Charlie Hebdo in the 1990s and when the magazine moved to new offices on Rue Nicolas Appert in 2011, he already knew some of its staff. The magazine moved after its previous office was burned out after it published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

Perrin said he rushed to the window and saw a class of schoolchildren below on the street. “I heard someone yelling at them to get away, that there were people with guns.” There were approximately 20 people in the TV production company’s offices, including some trainees. “I told everyone to go to the third floor and to go to the roof, or to be ready to go to the roof.”

A member of staff had recently returned from reporting in Syria and there were two flak jackets in the office. Perrin put one on and began to put furniture behind the door that opened on to the corridor.

The shooting, when it began, was loud, and he and the staff could hear it on the rooftop. "It was rapid but controlled. Shot by shot. It did not sound like rough firing." Perrin and his colleagues watched as two gunmen emerged into the street and got into a small car. He saw them shooting but did not witness the killing of policeman Ahmed Merabet. Someone took some film of the gunmen.

When they had driven off up a narrow, one-way street, he returned to his office and looked out a window, where he saw a man on the street calling for help for a friend who was wounded in the chest. "That was when I first knew that someone had been shot." He looked through the door's spyhole and saw a doctor he knew called Patrick Pelloux in the corridor.

Pelloux, who is head of the emergency room doctors' association in France, as well as a columnist with Charlie Hebdo, had been in an office nearby when he got a message from someone in the magazine asking him to come immediately.

Laurent Richard from the TV company, who had been down on the street, also appeared in the corridor. Perrin went out and down the corridor to the magazine's offices.

“It is a really small office. There are two small corridors, one straight and one to the left. There was a group of people on the floor, huddled, women sobbing, but mostly silence. Some people were trying to comfort them.”

Perrin went into the conference room, where he was confronted by a bloody scene of death and agony. “It was a war scene, absolutely. You could smell the shooting. It is a small, confined room and the smell of the gunpowder was very strong. And there was the blood.”

He thinks there were eight dead or dying people in the room, as well as three wounded and another wounded person outside in the corridor. “I had done some first-aid training some years ago. I knew how to check for a pulse. Some you did not need to check. You could see from their face [that they were dead]. Some died just as we arrived.”

He, Richard, Pelloux and a friend of Pelloux were in the room. It was not shot up the way you might imagine if someone had been shooting wildly with a Kalashnikov, he said, although the furniture was scattered around.

Cartoonist Laurent Riss, whom Perrin had worked with, was wounded and lying in an awkward position on the floor.

“I didn’t know if he should move, if maybe he had a wound to the spine. I told him help was on its way.” He moved to help another of the wounded, who had a tourniquet applied to a bad leg wound. Then the emergency services arrived.

Perrin is the French journalist who first got the the leaked material from the PricewaterhouseCoopers offices in Luxembourg which later, after the same material was sourced by the International Consortium of International Journalists (ICIJ), led to last year's "Lux leaks" revelations.The Irish Times worked with Perrin and the ICIJ on the project.

Asked what the mood was like among the city’s journalists, Perrin said: “Dizzy, with all that is happening, even now.”