Comment on Quick thinking averted massacre at Paris attacks stadium

SAINT-DENIS, France (AP) — The suicide bombers' remains, clingy flecks of flesh spread in a 10-meter (yard) radius around where they exploded, were flushed down the drains of the city they sought to terrorize, washed away by municipal workers with detergent sprays and power hoses. Yet instead of detonating inside the national stadium packed with 79,000 people watching France beat Germany at soccer, they detonated on less crowded streets outside, during the match, including one in a lonely dead end street 500 meters (yards) away. [...] blasts inside the stadium or outside among crowds before and after the game would have been more murderous and caused even more panic, further overloading Paris hospitals and rescue services scrambling to treat hundreds of casualties with battlefield wounds shot or blown up in the city center. A combination of solid security at the huge arena, quick thinking in a crisis, modern stadium infrastructure and apparent mistakes in the attackers' planning appears to have averted a massacre, suggesting that the host of next year's European soccer championships, which are expected to draw millions of fans from far and wide, is as well-equipped as any nation can be against this vicious new type of threat. The stadium, much-loved because it was there that the national team won the World Cup in 1998, was the first target hit in Friday night's murderous spree of six separate gun and suicide bomb attacks. At least one of the attackers tried to get in, despite not having a ticket, but was turned away, said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to publicly discuss the complex and fast-evolving investigation. Jeremy, a stadium security guard who would only give his first name for fear of losing his job, said he'd just arrived to help with the aftermath of that blast when a second went off minutes later, 200 meters (yards) away outside Gate H. The third attacker, for reasons still unknown, waited another 23 minutes to trigger his vest, killing only himself, away from the stadium, next to a tree and a traffic sign in a small side-road wedged between office buildings. Back at the stadium, after the match, truck driver Abdelaziz Boucenna was thrown to the floor and trampled, breaking two fingers and bones in the wrist of his left hand, as people panicked as they were filing out.