Man Hiding Under Sink Helped Police Take Down Charlie Hebdo Shooters
A graphic designer working in a small French print shop unexpectedly helped police take down Said and Cherif Kouachi, the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, by hiding underneath a sink for eight hours.
Lilian Lepère was coming into work when he suddenly became part of the dramatic standoff between the terrorists and French police in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele, less than 48 hours after the Kouachi brothers had killed staffers of the French satirical magazine, as well as policemen and security guards. While his boss, Michel Catalano, was taken hostage, Lepère was not, due to some quick thinking and a 3-by-2-foot cabinet underneath the sink in the company’s lunchroom.
“It’s not a very big space,” the 26-year-old said in a TV interview translated by France24. He immediately crammed himself into the space, and endured eight hours curled up in the fetal position around a leaky pipe.
“If I made even the smallest movement either the doors would open on one side, or I would hit the wall on the other side,” Lepère said.
At one point, he was nearly discovered by a thirsty terrorist:
“At one point one of the two men opened a cabinet just next to mine. I thought ‘he’s going to go through all the cabinets. If he’s looking for something he is going to go through all the cabinets,” he recalled.
“He went to the fridge and then came back towards where I was hiding. Then he started drinking from the sink just above me,” said Lepère.
“I could hear the water running just next to my head, I could see his shadow through the crack between the doors. The sink leaks so I started to feel water running across my back. It was surreal. I was thinking ‘this is like the movies, this only happens in movies,” he added.
As telephones began ringing in the office, however, Lepère realized he could try to contact his friends and family and began texting them: “I am hidden on the first floor. I think they have killed everyone,” he said, according to the National Post. “Tell the police to intervene.”
For hours afterwards, Lepère began communicating with the police outside, giving them information about the building’s layout and the locations of the Kouachi brothers — information that eventually helped French security forces kill the two armed men.
Catalano, who Lepère credits for keeping him hidden, was eventually released. “If they had found me, we would have been two hostages and maybe things would have turned out differently,” he noted.
[h/t Slate]
[Image via screenshot]
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