Emmanuel Macron will express this Thursday, March 11 the support of the French for the victims of terrorism, during a ceremony at the Invalides, before a meeting with the printer who had been taken hostage by the Kouachi brothers in 2015, still traumatized today.
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For this second National Day of Homage to the Victims of Terrorism, the Head of State, accompanied by his wife Brigitte, will lay a wreath at 9:30 a.m. in front of the
La Parole Bred
statue
, representing a beheaded woman, dedicated to the victims of the attacks .
Former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, Prime Minister Jean Castex and several ministers and mayors will be present.
An extract from the book
Le lambeau
by journalist Philippe Lançon, seriously injured in the
Charlie Hebdo
attack
in 2015, will be read by Chloé Bertolus, the surgeon who operated on him.
Then Emmanuel Macron will meet with the presidents of thirteen victims' associations.
He will then go to the Catalano printing house in Dammartin-en-Goële (Seine-et-Marne) to meet Michel Catalano, who had been taken hostage by the Kouachi brothers during their run after the
Charlie Hebdo
attack
in 2015. The boss of this small printing company wrote to the Head of State to invite him to the twenty years of his company, said the Elysee, welcoming the
“optimistic”
speech
of the entrepreneur.
"The lump in the stomach"
On January 9, 2015, around 8:30 a.m., Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, hunted down by the police after sowing death in
Charlie Hebdo
two days earlier, rang the doorbell of the printing press about thirty kilometers away. north of Paris.
The business manager immediately recognizes the two heavily armed men.
He immediately sends his employee Lilian Lepère to hide under a sink.
Then begins for him a terrifying hour and a half, where he fears every moment that the killers will discover Lilian and kill them both.
A patrol of gendarmes arrives and exchanges fire with the two brothers.
One of them, injured in the neck, asks him to put a bandage on him, Michel Catalano complies.
The two attackers let him out.
Lilian Lepère remains hidden inside.
At the end of the afternoon, François Hollande ordered to storm the printing press as well as the Hyper Cacher at the Porte de Vincennes, where their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly was also entrenched with hostages.
The three men are shot.
Michel Catalano finds his employee safe and sound.
Its printing press was destroyed by the explosives used during the assault.
After the attack, the printer takes the full brunt of post-traumatic stress:
"I had trouble expressing myself, I cried, I stammered, at night I didn't sleep, I had flashes that kept coming back. He
said last summer.
Six years later, he still has a
“lump in his stomach”
every morning when he opens the portal to his printing press.
He says he held on thanks to his family, his friends, the AFVT (French Association of Victims of Terrorism), and these
“thousands of letters of support received from all over the world”
.
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The National Day of Homage to the Victims of Terrorism, enacted in 2019, is being organized for the second year in a row.
The date of March 11 was chosen at European level by associations, in reference to the Madrid attack in 2004. Since January 2015, the attacks have left more than 260 dead in France, the deadliest being those of November 13. 2015 with 130 deaths in Paris and Saint-Denis, and that of July 14, 2016 in Nice (86 deaths).
In total, more than 6,300 victims and relatives have been supported by the Victims Guarantee Fund (FGTI) since 2015. More than 400 French victims of an attack abroad have been followed as well as nearly 1,000 foreign victims. .
"The terrorist threat remains high," said
the Elysee, specifying that 33 attacks have been foiled since 2017.