Paris is to mark the one-year anniversary of last November’s terrorist attacks that killed 130 people with a concert by Sting to reopen the Bataclan venue and a series of commemorations across the French capital.



The British singer, who last played at the Bataclan in 1979, will perform a one-hour charity set on Saturday night to mark its reopening. The venue was refurbished after 90 people were killed there during the attacks on 13 November last year.

All proceeds will go to the two associations set up to support survivors and the families of the attack victims, Life for Paris and 13 Novembre: Fraternité Verité.

On Sunday morning, President François Hollande and the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, will visit each of the sites of the attacks to unveil commemorative plaques, starting at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, where the first suicide bombs were detonated.

Six plaques will be unveiled, including outside the bars and restaurants where gunmen opened fire, listing the names of those that died there.

Sting will perform a one-hour charity set. Photograph: Tatan Syuflana/AP

With six months to go until the French presidential election, the government wants to avoid any accusations of seeking to make political capital out of the anniversary.

France’s new minister for “aid to victims”, Juliette Méadel, said the tone would be one of “sobriety” and the commemorations would be centred on the victims and survivors.

On Sunday, Life for Paris will hold its own memorial ceremony at the town hall of Paris’s 11th arrondissement. 13 Novembre: Fraternité Verité called on French people to place candles in their windows on Sunday night.

The investigation into the attacks is ongoing and has laid bare security lapses. A French parliamentary investigation identified multiple failings by intelligence agencies.

Nine of the known attackers and four key accomplices are dead, while eight suspects are in custody in France and six elsewhere, including two in Belgium. Members of the same terror cell were behind the Brussels attacks that killed 32 people in March.

Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the Paris attack team, who was able to flee France by car to Belgium hours after the incidents, has been transferred to a French prison but is refusing to speak to or cooperate with investigators.

Investigators said this week they had made a breakthrough by identifying a Moroccan-Belgian jihadist based in Syria as a key plotter of the Paris attacks. Oussama Atar, a 32-year-old suspected member of Islamic State, was already wanted over the Brussels attacks.