A man who helped a young pregnant woman as she dangled from a window of the Bataclan theatre during Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris said he left his hiding place so he could help her.
The woman was hanging off the window ledge in an attempt to evade the gunmen who were indiscriminately killing concertgoers during a show by the band Eagles of Death Metal.
In a video shot on a mobile phone by Le Monde journalist Daniel Psenny, the woman can be heard screaming: "Help, help, I'm pregnant, catch me if I fall!"
The man, called Sebastian, told the La Provence newspaper: "She was begging people down below if they would catch her if she jumped. But it was chaos down there. We were 15 metres above the ground."
He described how he was clinging to an air vent outside the building before he went back inside to pull the woman into the building.
"I held on for five minutes and then the pregnant woman, who was exhausted, begged me to help her get back inside. That's what I did," he said.
He added that he later encountered a terrorist who placed the barrel of a gun on his leg – but he somehow escaped unhurt.
"Five minutes later I felt the barrel of a Kalashnikov against my leg and a terrorist yelling: 'Get down from there... Lie on the ground'," he said.
Following their orders, he lay down with others, as gunmen shot dead 89 people in the theatre.
Sebastian added that at one point the gunmen entered negotiations with police, during which some injured hostages were released.
He also claims that instead of being killed, survivors were told to contact the media and tell the story of what happened.
Psenny, the journalist who shot the video, lives behind the Bataclan theatre and was injured by a bullet which struck his left arm at around 3am on Saturday morning.
At least 129 people were killed and more than 350 were injured in a series of coordinated terror attacks in Paris on Friday night.