Antoine Leiris: Paris attacks victim's husband who posted moving Facebook status gives first interview

The French journalist, who lost his wife Helene at the Bataclan theatre, gave an interview to CNN saying he refused to let Isis win

Mr Leiris has promised to raise his son, Melvil, without hate (Antoine Leiris, via Facebook)

A French man who posted a moving message to Isis on Facebook after his wife was murdered in the Paris terror attacks has said he will not “succumb to hate” in his first television interview.

Antoine Leiris's poignant Facebook post following his wife Helene Muyal-Leiris's murder at the Bataclan theatre has been shared by thousands.

Speaking to journalist Hala Gorani on CNN, he said: “They can have all the Kalashnikovs etc, we stand free. We stand with life, with happiness and no they don’t win. No. No, we stand.

“We don’t pretend that we are not sad, devastated. No, we are, but we stand.”

He said he forced himself to write the Facebook post for his 17-month-old son Melvil, so he can “grow up like a human being being open to the world, like a person who will love what his mother loved: literature, culture in general, music, cinema and pictures”.

“I want my son to be open to the world like his mother was and if I hadn’t forced myself to not to succumb to hate I would have raised a person who would grow up just like the terrorists”, he added.

Helene Muyal-Leiris lost her life during the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris

Mr Leiris said he spent two days searching “every hospital in Paris” for his wife with his brother before he received a call from the coroner telling him she was dead.

He said: “I felt very bad to have left her alone - that she could have lived through this and I wasn’t even there. I just want to be with her.”

The string of coordinated shootings and suicide bombings across Paris last Friday left 129 people dead.

A total of 89 people, including Ms Muyal-Leiris, were killed at the Bataclan theatre during a performance by American band Eagles of Death Metal.

The man who reportedly planned the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed along with his cousin during a raid in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis on Thursday morning.