A senior executive at the French TV station that communicated directly with two of the gunmen during the Paris terror attacks has spoken of the responsibility he felt during his chilling conversation with one of the killers.
Alexis Delahousse, deputy director of the newsroom at BFMTV, said he could not describe his three-minute conversation with Amédy Coulibaly as an “interview” in the journalistic sense. “For terrorists to call our newsroom is exceptional.”
He spoke to Coulibaly just two hours after he had burst into a Jewish deli in eastern Paris opening fire with a Kalasnikov, ultimately killing four customers.
“He was speaking quite slowly, the answers were short. He knew what he wanted to say. It wasn’t a speech, but it was like propaganda, he had rehearsed it,” said Delahousse, who recorded the conversation.
Asked if he felt like he was in a horror movie, Delahousse said. “This was not a movie, people were already dead. We were worried like everyone in Paris.
“It was an exceptional day. I hope I never have a day like it again,” he said.
“The word to describe it for me was responsibility. I said to myself I have to stay calm, not make him angry or he will kill other people.”
Delahousse kept him on the phone for three minutes and immediately shared the interview with the police who he suspects were already eavesdropping on the conversation.
“A few years ago terrorists used to go to Agence France Presse [the French news wire], now they go to a TV channel.”
He likens BFMTV to CNN and believes the terrorists chose to talk to the station because “the credo of our channel is like CNN – it’s happening now” unlike “traditional channels like TF1”.
Delahousse was one of three journalists at the station who spoke to Coulibaly and to Chérif Kouachi, one of the two jihadist brothers involved in the Charlie Hebdo massacre two days previously.
The extraordinary interviews, which were only broadcast after the gunmen were killed and the twin sieges were over, have put the station on the international map.
Launched in 2005 as an offshoot of the business radio station, BFM, the station is now the leading 24-hour rolling news channel in the country with audiences of up to 10 million.
It inadvertently landed an interview with Kouachi at 9am on Friday when BFMTV journalist Igor Sahiri called the factory where on-the-run extremists had taken refuge following the bloodbath two days before. He was simply phoning round factories in the area in an effort to confirm the location where the standoff with police had begun.
Coulibaly however had called the station, speaking first to BMFTV journalist Linda Bouziad who first worked to verify he was not a hoax caller.
She explained: “The first thing I had to do was consider if he was for real. Anyone can ring up and claim they are a terrorist. After some time I understood he was real. I stayed calm. I couldn’t record the conversation, but I asked him how many hostages he had and he said 16. I asked him how many were dead and he said four.
“It felt very strange to think I am talking to a man who has just killed four people, you can’t imagine how strange it was.
“I asked him why did he call BFMTV. He told me he couldn’t talk directly to the police. He told me that BFMTV was a reference for the media and he thought we could open a dialogue with the police.
“He then gave me a number of one of the hostage’s phones and asked me to give it to the police.”
Bouziad, 35, who was born in Algeria and raised in France, said she has become accustomed to terrorism in her home country. “They have had the same problem with extremists in Algeria as here in Paris and I visit the country a lot, it is not new to me.”
