As medics treated 60 victims of Friday’s killing spree in northeast Paris, the queue to give blood at the George-Pompidou hospital where they were taken grew to up to a hundred within an hour of its blood centre opening. The websites for the donor organisations Établissement Français du Sang and Dondusang Paris were down on Saturday morning after a surge in traffic but that didn’t stop scores of Parisians – students as well as parents with their children – lining up to help.
Aurélie Moine, 23, told The Independent: "These places where the attacks happened are the kind of places I go to and I wanted to help in any way I could."
Armelle Partiot, 48, lives near the hospital and said she heard the ambulances arriving. "It was then that I decided to come down here to give my blood", she said. "It’s amazing to see so many people here"”.
A doctor who was on a business trip from Belgium, Peter Baines, 40, said after watching the news he travelled to the first hospital he could find – "I was urgently wanting to give blood. And it seems Parisians had the same idea."
Of the 60 patients being treated for gun wounds, 20 are said to be in a critical condition.
