8:30 a.m., in the deserted commercial area, a neighborhood cordoned off for the purposes of the exercise, a “witness” contacts the 17th: a man entered the Capitole cinema, armed and hooded. “There are dead people everywhere. It’s shooting. I don’t know how many there are. We have to come quickly”, he says into the receiver. Very quickly, “exercise, exercise, gunfire in progress at the capitol cinema”, resonates on the radio waves. In the gendarmerie units, the first teams set out. Thus begins the fictional scenario of a “mass killing” in the multiplex premises. Training, for all gendarmerie soldiers called to intervene in the event of an event of this type: from “everyday” gendarmes, to specialized groups like the GIGN, including external partners (firefighters, in occurrence).
Ten minutes after the alert, two crews from the Pontet gendarmerie brigade disembarked. Helmet with visor, bulletproof vest, semi-automatic pistol aimed at the glass doors, they progress towards the building. For around twenty minutes, these “everyday” gendarmes found themselves on the front line, advancing in the hall where the “wounded” were lying. “Faced with this type of threat, we are in a time war. If there is a mass killing in progress, the teams must intervene, with their means, to try to stop the killing and perhaps move on to something else, like this morning, a hostage taking”, time for the specialized teams to arrive, explains Commander Nicolas Zymelka, squadron leader of the Avignon gendarmerie company.
Gradually, reinforcements arrive, in a “gradation” of forces: the Psig of Avignon, an elite unit; then, soldiers from the GIGN branch in Orange. Two helicopters drop men off on the roof of the multiplex, “by smooth rope”. “We do it when we can’t land, like here, on a roof,” explains the squadron leader of the GIGN branch in Orange. As the first crew descends on the rope, a gunner “secures” them from the second helicopter. Once the teams have established a foothold in the cinema, the “war of time and information” begins: location of the threat, number of “terrorists”, counting of the injured to come “to their aid as quickly as possible”.
Around the cinema, the military coordinates to cordon off the perimeter, a security PC is set up. After approximately 2 hours, each room is sifted by the teams, and the hostage situation is lifted.
Soldiers are trained at least once every two years, depending on the unit, in this type of exercise. Rather three to four times a year for the GIGN. Since the Bataclan attacks, the gendarmerie has systematized these exercises from 2017. The challenge, explains Commander Zymelka: “know how to coordinate effectively and quickly”, facing “a terrorist threat that can strike at any time and anywhere.”
