A British doctor is desperately trying to find a woman who helped him flee gunmen who stormed the Bataclan theatre, killing 89 people during Friday’s Paris attacks.
Mark Backwell, a hospital worker in London, said he wants trace the woman, he knows only as Katie, and “say thank you” after she held his wounds when he sought refuge from the siege in a nearby shop.
Fifty year-old Mr Backwell was hit by bullets in his left shoulder and above his left wrist, when he crawled through fallen bodies to escape the attack, which erupted while he watched an Eagles of Death Metal gig with friends.
He told The Sun: “I heard a sound like firecrackers… followed by piercing female screams. The band stopped playing in their tracks.
“Everyone around me was dropping to the ground. I went down on the floor with them. As I was going down, it occurred to me it was gunfire.”
Mr Backwell, a consultant at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, said he crawled to an exit around15ft away from the stage, while a gunman fired into the crowd from an upstair's balcony.
“The shooting went on for an eternity,” he said. “It was very rapid – crack, crack, crack, crack. Had I been further back, I’d have been dead.”
Despite being shot twice, Mr Backwell suffered only flesh wounds and was able to scramble to the exit, sheltering in the shop where he remained hidden for two hours.
“I staggered out into a back alley and started running,” he said, “I ended up in a nearby office or shop.”
“I was bleeding heavily. A woman called Katie who I had never met before was holding my wounds closed. The doctors came to look after us.”
Speaking of the woman who helped him, he said: “I don’t know who she was, I want to find her and say thank you”
A handful of Britons remained in a critical condition in hospital yesterday, following the Bataclan attack, the most deadly in the string of attacks on Friday, The Times reports.
Nick Alexander, 36, from Colchester, Essex, who was selling merchandise for the band is the one confirmed British death from the incident.
At least 129 people died in the attacks, comprised of seven co-ordinated shootings and explosions across the French capital.
