PARIS ATTACKS: Two Spaniards mistakenly declared dead in Paris rejoice with loved ones
“I’m looking at myself right now and I’m alive,” Alberto Pardo Touceda, 33, wrote on his Facebook page just hours after his family were visited by plainclothes police officers.
His mother, Pilar Touceda, told local reporters from her home in Pontevedra, Galicia, it had been the saddest and then happiest day of her life.
“I’m cancelling the funeral of my son,” she added.
Pardo, who was in Strasbourg on Friday night, believes he was mistakenly believed to have been shot dead at the Bataclan because one of the rock venue victims may have been in possession of an ID card he lost in Bordeaux three years ago.
Jorge Alonso de Celada, 59, the second Spaniard mistakenly believed dead, returned to his hotel in Paris to find police there.
His family had told Spanish authorities he was alive and well after he was reported to have been killed in a restaurant attacked by the terrorists on Friday evening.
Clearing up the confusion, Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, said he confirmed the death of only one Spaniard.
He has been named as Juan Alberto González Garrido, a 29-year-old engineer who died inside the Bataclan concert hall. He had been at the Friday evening gig there with his wife, also Spanish, who survived the attack.
The couple had been married in the summer.
Meanwhile, a man says his prosthetic leg saved his life as terrorists systematically shot their way through the Paris theatre.
Philonenko Gregoire was lying on the floor of the Bataclan concert hall with hundreds of others upon the orders of the terrorists.
An armed man then approached him.
“So he was on the floor, legs bent and the terrorist kicked his leg to see if he was dead,” Gregoire’s daughter, Valentine, told Euronews.
“My dad gasped a little bit.
“The man did it again, twice or three times again,” she continued.
“What happened next? The man stopped beside him, he fired shots just 30 centimetres from his head.”
Gregoire said before the man next to him was killed, he had a red laser from the gun pointed at his forehead.
“I don’t know why I’m alive, only for my legs,” he told the BBC.
