At least 100 reported dead at Paris venue Le Bataclan

“This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share”, he said.

Video footage taken by a French journalist from a balcony overlooking an alleyway outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris has captured the horror of people fleeing from gunmen who stormed the venue.

CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/EPA Roughly 15 people were believed to be shot dead at the venue, officials said.

“It was war crimes, ” Pearce said.

Mostefai, whose identity was confirmed using a severed fingertip, was known as being close to radical Islam, but had never been linked to terrorism.

“We heard a loud bang and then I heard people screaming behind me”, he told the BBC. “They shot from the balcony”, he said.

Syria has been torn by war for almost five years, with fighting between former president Bashar al-Assad’s regime; rebel groups and IS militants killing more than a quarter of a million Syrians, forcing an estimated 5 million refugees to flee the country and displacing an estimated 7 million people.

Pearce saw two people he called terrorists enter the theater, “very calm, very determined” and firing “randomly”.

Escaping hostages from Bataclan Theater in Paris, France described pools of blood and gunmen spraying indiscriminately with shotguns and Kalashnikovs late November 11. The shootings took place around the same time as other armed assaults and bombings in and around Paris.

It was one of multiple terrorist attacks that occurred in the French city late Friday.

Witnesses in Paris said a few attackers arrived in a auto with Belgian plates.

French police said the passport was found “near the body of one of the attackers” after the Bataclan carnage, and had also asked Greece to check on the fingerprints of another man.

Earlier information from a Greek police source that he too had registered on Leros was later refuted. “Two thousand people were there maximum and it was – it was frightful”.

A bomber reportedly exploded at a cafe near the Stade de France, where the French national soccer team was playing a game against Germany. He then saw “everyone” running from the theater and immediately thought of the September 11 attacks.

It was a sell-out crowd at the Bataclan on Friday for the 9 p.m. concert by an American group, the Eagles of Death Metal.

Mr O’Connor spotted a small fire exit at the side of the stage but could not get past the crowd clambouring over the security barriers and each other in sheer terror. Police stormed the building and killed two gunmen.

Several metro stations are closed by the police. DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images An injured woman is evacuated near the Bataclan concert hall.