A French man whose wife was murdered in the Paris terror attacks last week has said he will not “succumb to hate” in his first television interview.
Antoine Leiris posted a moving and defiant message to Isis on Facebook after he lost his wife Helene Muyal-Leiris during the attack on the Bataclan theatre on Friday.
Speaking to journalist Hala Gorani on CNN, he said: “They can have all the Kalashnikovs etc, we stand free. We stand with life, with happiness and no they don’t win. No. No, we stand.
“We don’t pretend that we are not sad, devastated. No, we are, but we stand.”
He said he forced himself to write the Facebook post for his 17-month-old son, Melvil, so he can “grow up like a human being being open to the world, like a person who will love what his mother loved: literature, culture in general, music, cinema and pictures”.
“I want my son to be open to the world like his mother was and if I hadn’t forced myself to not to succumb to hate I would have raised a person who would grow up just like the terrorists”, he added.
Mr Leiris said he spent two days searching “every hospital in Paris” searching for his wife with his brother before he received a call from the coroner telling him she was dead.
He said: “I felt very bad to have left her alone - that she could have lived through this and I wasn’t even there. I just want to be with her.”
129 people were killed in a string of coordinated shootings and suicide bombings across Paris.
89 people, including Ms Muyal-Leiris, were killed at the Bataclan theatre during a performance by the American band Eagles of Death Metal.
The alleged mastermind of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed along with his cousin during a raid in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis on Thursday morning.
