LATER, THE FRENCH AUTHORITIES WOULD determine that the bomb weighed in excess of five hundred kilograms. It had been contained in a white Renault Trafic transit van and was detonated, according to numerous security cameras along the street, at ten o’clock precisely, the scheduled start time of the Weinberg Center conference. The attackers, it seemed, were nothing if not punctual.
In retrospect, the weapon was unnecessarily large for so modest a target. The French experts concluded that a charge of perhaps two hundred kilograms would have been more than sufficient to level the offices and kill or wound all those inside. At five hundred kilograms, however, the bomb toppled buildings and shattered windows the entire length of the rue des Rosiers. The shock wave was so violent—Paris actually recorded an earthquake for the first time in longer than anyone could remember—that the damage extended belowground as well. Water and gas mains cracked throughout the arrondissement, and a Métro train jumped the tracks while approaching the station at the H?tel de Ville. More than two hundred passengers were injured, many severely. The Paris police initially thought the train had been bombed, too, and in response they ordered an evacuation of the entire Métro system. Life in the city quickly ground to a halt. For the attackers, it was an unexpected windfall.
The enormous force of the blast dug a crater in the rue des Rosiers twenty feet in depth. Nothing remained of the Renault Trafic, though the left rear cargo door, curiously intact, was found floating in the Seine near Notre-Dame, having traveled a distance of nearly a kilometer. In time, investigators would determine that the vehicle had been stolen in Vaulx-en-Velin, a bleak Muslim-majority suburb of Lyon. It had been driven to Paris on the eve of the attack—by whom, it was never established—and left outside a kitchen-and-bath store on the boulevard Saint-Germain. There it would remain until ten minutes past eight the following morning, when a man collected it. He was clean-shaven, approximately five foot ten inches in height, and was wearing a billed cap and sunglasses. He drove the streets of central Paris—aimlessly, or so it appeared—until nine twenty, when he picked up an accomplice outside the Gare du Nord. Initially, the French police and intelligence services operated under the assumption that the second attacker was male, too. Later, after analyzing all available video images, they concluded that the accomplice was in fact a woman.
By the time the Renault reached the Marais, both occupants had concealed their faces with balaclava masks. And when they emerged from the vehicle outside the Weinberg Center, both were heavily armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, handguns, and grenades. The center’s two security guards were killed instantly, as were four other people who had yet to be cleared into the building. A passerby bravely attempted to intervene and was mercilessly slaughtered. The remaining pedestrians in the narrow street wisely fled.
The gunfire outside the Weinberg Center ceased at 9:59:30, and the two masked attackers moved calmly west along the rue des Rosiers to the rue Vieille-du-Temple, where they entered a popular boulangerie. Eight customers were waiting in an orderly queue. All were killed, including the woman behind the counter, who pleaded for her life before being shot several times.
It was at that instant, as the woman was collapsing to the floor, that the bomb inside the van exploded. The force of the blast shattered the windows of the boulangerie, but otherwise the building remained undamaged. The two attackers did not immediately flee the carnage they had inflicted. Instead, they returned to the rue des Rosiers, where a single surviving security camera recorded them moving methodically through the debris, executing the wounded and the dying. Among their victims was Hannah Weinberg, who was shot twice despite the fact that she had almost no chance of survival. The attackers’ cruelty was matched only by their competence. The woman was seen calmly clearing a jammed round from her Kalashnikov before killing a badly wounded man who, a moment earlier, had been seated on the fourth floor of the building.
For several hours after the attack, the Marais remained cordoned off, inaccessible to all but emergency workers and investigators. Finally, in late afternoon, when the last of the fires had been extinguished and the site was determined to be free of secondary explosives, the French president arrived. After touring the devastation, he declared it “a Holocaust in the heart of Paris.” The remark did not meet with a favorable reception in some of the more restive banlieues. In one, there erupted a spontaneous celebration that was quickly snuffed out by riot police. Most of the newspapers ignored the incident. A senior French police official called it “an unpleasant distraction” from the immediate task at hand, which was finding the perpetrators.
Their escape from the Marais, like everything else about the operation, had been meticulously planned and executed. A Peugeot Satelis motorbike had been left for them on a nearby street, along with a pair of black helmets. They traveled north, the male driving, the woman clinging to his waist, passing unnoticed through the stream of approaching police cars and ambulances. A traffic camera photographed them for the last time near the hamlet of Villeron, in the Val-d’Oise department. By midday they were the targets of the largest manhunt in French history.