First the black-clad terrorists strafed the audience randomly; then they stood over the prone and writhing victims one by one and finished the job.
Witnesses to the chaos at a sold-out rock concert in Paris described a scene of cruelty and carnage, with estimates of at least 87 dead.
The horror played out live on Twitter.
“Ils abattent tout le monde,” bleeding concert-goer Benjamin Cazenoves tweeted from inside Le Bataclan theater, where he was among dozens who were taken hostage.
Translation: “They are slaughtering everyone!”
“I am still inside Bataclan,” Benjamin Cazenoves tweeted/a> next as bullets continued to fly.
“First level. Seriously hurt!” Cazenoves tweeted shortly after 5 p.m. New York time. “They slaughtered everyone. One by one. 1st floor quickly!!!!”
“Alive. Just staying alive…Carnage…Bodies everywhere,” came another Cazenoves tweet.
More than 1,000 concert-goers had been watching the show by the California-based band Eagles of Death Metal.
“It was carnage. It looked like a battlefield. There was blood everywhere,” concert-goer Marc Coupris told The Guardian.
“There were bodies everywhere. I was at the far side of the hall when shooting began.
“There seemed to be at least two gunmen. They shot from the balcony. I saw my final hour unfurl before me,
“I thought this was the end. I thought I’m finished, I’m finished. I was terrified.”
The theater is just five blocks from the offices of Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, where Islamic terrorists killed 12 people last January.
Escaping hostages told France Info radio that the young men, who were toting AK-47 assault rifles, shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they opened fire.
“I was in the audience and I heard what sounded like a firecracker,” Jerome Boucer told The Guardian.
“It was loud but the gig was very loud and I thought it was something that was part of the show. I think lots of people did, too.
“Then they started firing. I saw what I thought was at least two people, then I fled.
“The exits were clearly marked and I just ran. There were wounded, there was a lot of blood. Blood everywhere.”
French station BFM-TV said that one of the gunmen at the theater also shouted: “It’s for Syria.”
And a woman in the audience, identified only as Yasmin, told BFM, “I saw two guys. The biggest one said: ‘What are you doing in Syria? You’re going to pay now.’ Then he opened fire.
“I saw bodies falling all around me. I was shot in the foot. It was carnage. I’ve never seen so many dead people all around,” she said.
When SWAT units finally stormed the theater, three of the attackers began hurling grenades at teh audience before detonating explosive suicide belts.
“Three of them blew themselves up and a fourth, who was also wearing a belt, was hit by police fire and blew up as he fell,” one source told The Telegraph.
Police brought out at least 100 hostages from the concert hall, many of whom were badly injured, CNN reported.
Witnesses recalled a scene of horror — with some terrified concert-goers hiding out in an attic, according to Le Monde. Some witnesses told the newspaper that terrorists were firing from the balcony onto the audience below.
“It was chaos,” one survivor wrote on the site of Le Figaro. “I hear noises like exploding firecrackers. I see the singer remove his guitar. I turn, I see a guy armed with an automatic weapon that shoots into the air,” she wrote.
“Everyone folds to the floor.”
Two hours later, victims were still reaching out to the outside world via social media.
“Ten minutes of gunshots in a small concert room. It was horrible,” escaped hostage and French radio reporter Julien Pearce told CNN journalist Michael Holmes, who tweeted the exchange.
“People yelled, screamed and everybody lay on the floor,” Pearce said.
“And lay for 10 minutes. Ten minutes, and horrific minutes . . . The terrorists were very calm, very determined.”
Desperate people inside the venue were trampling each other as they tried to escape the mayhem, he said.
One of the terrorists looked around 20 years old, Pearce said.
Managing to run out through a stage door as the gunmen reloaded, Pearce saw some two dozen bodies lying in the street, he said.
He ran into a teenage girl who was bleeding from two gunshot wounds in her leg.
“I grabbed her, and I put her on my back and we ran,” he said, adding that he put her in a taxi and told the driver to take her to the hospital.
Others had their own tales of horror.
“I followed some people who were running out through a door to the right of the stage,” Frederic Nowak told The Telegraph.
“It led to stairs but all the doors off the stairs were locked. We were stuck there for about ten minutes. There were thirty or forty people there. Then we went further up the stairs and arrived at the roof.
“We got out through a window and we saw a man whose apartment was in the building next door waving to us. We made out way over the rooftop and he let us in through his attic window. We stayed there until we heard the past police raiding the venue a while later.”
All of the Eagles of Death Metal members survived the attack, a rep told People magazine.
Michael Dorio, the brother of drummer Julian Dorio said, “He had been performing and heard the gunshots. The whole band heard the gunshots before they saw anything and stopped playing, hit the deck and kind of went backstage and exited as fast as they could.”
There were reports that two people working with the band were shot, one fatally.
“We are still currently trying to determine the safety and whereabouts of all our band and crew,” read a message posted on the Eagles of Death Metal’s Facebook page earlier in the evening.
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Ruby and Ben Feuerherd