Ali no longer proudly camps out behind the stalls of his Paradis d'épines, at 35, rue d'Aubagne, in Marseille (1st). The trader, now retired on his land in Djibouti, told us five years ago his memory of the morning of November 5, 2018: “Everything was quiet, we didn't hear a sound. It was when we saw the thick white smoke filling the street that we understood that something serious had just happened.“
In the office, in the classrooms, in the cabins of cars stuck in traffic jams, all the clocks showed 9 a.m. a few minutes past when the unthinkable happened this Monday, November 5, 2018. The day before, the kids had prepared their schoolbag and reconnected their alarm clock.
At the age of 9, El Amine, who lived on the 1st floor of 65 rue d'Aubagne, had fallen asleep thinking of the friends he would soon meet again. Active and energetic, her mother Ouloume, 54, had arrived from the Comoros in Paris then in Marseille four years earlier to join her offspring: her children – she had six – were her life. The two-week school vacation ended on a rainy weekend. Which did not prevent Julien from filling his shopping bag on Saturday in the general food shop of Mamar, at 57 rue d'Aubagne: “He said he was going to have a big big party“, the manager explained to us.
