A Muslim security guard is being hailed as a French national hero for stopping a suicide bomber from entering the Stade de France on the night of the deadly Paris attacks.
Earlier, a Muslim security guard Zouheir was being hailed as the man who stopped the bomber but it has now been revealed that he was not the person who turned away the terrorist, according to Yahoo News.
It was in fact Salim Toorabally. The 42-year-old Mauritian immigrant and devout Muslim was manning a turnstile at Gate L of the stadium where the German national football team was facing off France when a young man in a dark jacket tried to follow another ticket-holder inside.
“He didn’t have a ticket, so I stopped him. I said, ‘If you don’t have a ticket, I’m not letting you in,’” he said, while speaking to NBC.
The suicide bomber, later identified as Bilal Hadfi who killed himself on November 13 when he detonated his suicide vest outside the stadium, insisted that he was meeting a friend who was waiting inside with a ticket. However, Toorabally, who was working as a security guard at the stadium for the first time did not allow him in and even warned another guard when Hadfi tried to do the same at another turnstile.
A few minutes later, the guard heard a blast. Hadfi had detonated his suicide vest but had failed to kill hundreds of people he was aiming for.
“I felt the explosion right in the heart. I knew it wasn’t fireworks coming from inside the stadium. But I didn’t see anything happening in the streets,” Toorabally said.
Then there was a second blast and a third. “It was like a volcano erupting. And I was really scared,” he recalled.
Toorabally then spent the remainder of the night helping the wounded guards and evacuating hundreds of people. It was much later when police questioned him that he recalled, “As a matter of fact, I stopped a guy who was trying to get into the stadium. I didn’t pay attention to his clothes, but I got a good look at his face.”
He was shaken to the core when police showed him a photograph of Hadfi. “I saw this man alive,” he told police, adding that he would ‘never’ forget the terrorist’s face.
“I could have been a victim too. And there could have been hundreds more killed too,” he said.
Toorabally also recalled how on the night of the attacks, his daughter had warned him to be “extra careful”. She was worried because the German team had to evacuate their hotel due to an earlier bomb scare.
Hailed as a hero, Toorabally insisted, “I was just doing my job.”
“I still hear those two explosions … boom, boom,” he said. “It stays with me. You could smell the explosion. The air was burning.”
Referring to Hadfi as a “kamikaze,” Toorabally said he never imagined Paris would be targeted like this by terrorists.
“For me, kamikazes are in Syria, but never at home here, never in Paris,” he said.
This article originally appeared on NBC News.
