He first thought of overwork due to the third wave of the coronavirus.
And then, no, we had to face the facts: “This year, I fell back.
But it was not just the Covid ”.
David Murat is a graduate in emergency and disaster medicine organization, in charge of logistics at Saint-Antoine hospital, nurse by training.
It is precisely these gestures, which form the basis of his profession, which he instinctively performed during that cursed evening.
Until the end, and at the risk of his life.
On November 13, 2015, David Murat was having dinner with a friend at Comptoir Voltaire, a Parisian brasserie where Brahim Abdeslam, brother of the still alive accused Salah Abdeslam, blew himself up.
At the Special Assize Court, which judges twenty people for these attacks, he delivers his story in a calm, calm voice.
His right hand, seized with irrepressible tremors, nevertheless betrays the immense confusion that inhabits him as he testifies, this Tuesday evening.
"I saw black and orange threads protruding"
After the explosion, he first thinks of a gas explosion. Then rushes from inside to the terrace. “I see three victims on the ground,” he recalls. There is Catherine, the waitress. I scream for someone to come and support her, so that she doesn't fall asleep. I see Theo peeing the blood on his neck, I compress him. And then there's a guy, slumped down. I take it, he is no longer breathing, he has no more pulse ”. He begins a cardiac massage. And, for more efficiency, tear his T-shirt. “I saw black and orange threads sticking out. There were a lot of bolts shining on the ground, he continues. It was there that I understood that it was not a gas explosion, but a terrorist ”.
This "guy" is Brahim Abdeslam.
David Murat massages him, at length, until help arrives to whom he discreetly explains the situation.
Order is given to evacuate the premises in an emergency.
Wounded and survivors are taken to a courtyard of a building, transformed into an advanced medical post.
"There, we are going to stick a label and a necklace on my neck:
you are a victim,
" he sums up.
Two days follow during which he will cling to a few obsessions so as not to sink: leaving the hospital where he is being held against his will, recovering his things at the scene of the attack, protecting his friend as best he can. leave for Mexico by plane on Monday morning.
Read also Attacks of November 13: alongside Salah Abdeslam, 13 active accomplices suspected in the box of the accused
“I told him not to worry.
I accompanied him to the airport, I went home.
And there, I collapsed, ”he says.
A sentence then echoed in his head, that pronounced by a policeman at the Comptoir Voltaire, the day after the attack, while he was forcing himself to recover his personal effects: "Are you the crazy one who massaged the suicide bomber?"
!
Cried the official incredulously.
"He told me I was crazy, since half of his belt hadn't exploded."
"I knew what I was doing"
As of Tuesday, David Murat is however at his post. Referent for Saint-Antoine of the Plan Blanc
(crisis mechanism triggered on the evening of November 13)
, he assists and participates in the debriefing. The rest is more complicated: he has a series of acute bronchitis due to the toxic smoke he inhaled, develops psoriasis and phobias. Forces himself to return to Comptoir Voltaire, to get better. With some relapses. “A lot of things have changed, but I have a taste for life,” he says all the same, while sober, adding that he has “no hatred against those who did that to us”.
On question from his lawyer, recalling the danger he was running in trying to revive a man wearing an explosive belt, he clarified his state of mind.
“I just wanted to save lives.
Whether it was a suicide bomber, I didn't care at all ”.
At the time, the procedure was to massage a person in cardiac arrest on the public highway until help arrived.
What he did.
“For me, he was injured,” he concludes.
I only did my first aid role, even though I knew what I was doing and who I was massaging ”.
