Alain Couanon. The survivor the HyperCacher supermarket attack recounted scenes from the siege in an interview with Sky News. Photo: Screenshot.

A survivor of last year’s HyperCacher massacre in Paris retold details of his harrowing ordeal in an interview with Sky News as France commemorated the first anniversary of the attack over the weekend.

Alain Couanon recounted rushing downstairs with a number of fellow hostages to the cellar of the kosher grocery store as soon as Islamist terrorist Amedy Coulibaly entered the premises. He described how at some point after hiding in the cold, dank area, they were sent a message by Coulibaly warning that if they didn’t return to the ground floor, he would come down and kill them all.

Couanon shared with Sky News what went through his mind at that moment. “After a few minutes I thought, ‘Well, if I have to be killed, in a way I prefer to be killed on the first floor than in a cellar like a rat.'”

He said that he and the other captives were surrounded by bloody corpses as they waited with Coulibaly — whom he described as “extremely quiet, calm [and] polite” — on the ground floor. He was “not aggressive at all,” Couanon said of the killer. “He was speaking in a very, very normal very, very polite way. Even with a certain kind of, well, I’d say, kindness.”

Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the attack on the HyperCacher market which was preceded by a few days by the killings at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. A total of 17 people were killed in both attacks.