10 years on from the Paris massacres, the scars run just as deep

Survivors and victims' loved ones gathered to remember atrocities

- BY THOMAS ADAMSON

SOPHIE Dias fought back tears yesterday as she described what she calls the “void that never closes” since her father became the first person killed in France's deadliest peacetime attack.

On November 13, 2015, coordinated terrorist assaults turned Paris into a theater of blood: gunfire on cafe terraces, explosions at a stadium, a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall.

The attacks killed 132 people, including two survivors who later died by suicide, with hundreds of more people wounded.

Many families now measure time as “before” and “after” The night hardened France's security reflexes while deepening a reflex of solidarity that has endured a decade later.

DETONATED

Dias's father Manuel died when the first bomber detonated outside the Stade de France. Speaking at the stadium gate where he was killed, she said the absence he left “weighs every morning and every evening, for 10 years’.

“We are told to turn the page, she said. “But the absence is immense, the shock is intact and the incomprehension remains.