Videos emerged showing a dramatic shootout at the scene, in which the French capital more resembled a war zone than the City of Light.
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Police launched their assault before dawn in the area close to the Stade de France stadium where three suicide bombers blew themselves up on Friday night, killing one person.
Several police officers were also hurt. The man who lived in the apartment and one of his acquaintances also were arrested.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the dead were a woman who blew herself up with an explosive vest and a man hit by projectiles and grenades.
The suspected Islamic State militants holed up in a northern Paris apartment following a raid by French police had planned an attack on La Defense business district in Paris, a source close to the investigation said on Wednesday.
There was no clear information on the fate of the suspected planner of the attacks, 27-year-old Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
The video shows an interview conducted by a reporter for France’s Le Petit Journal in a Paris square where people are laying flowers and lighting candles to honor the 129 victims killed in the attacks. More than 100 families have claimed their loved ones’ remains, CNN reported. The near simultaneous attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and the national stadium left hundreds wounded, with 221 people still in the hospital, 57 of them in intensive care, according to BBC News. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Then two more explosions. Authorities believe the auto is the same black SEAT-make vehicle that was found Saturday with three Kalashnikovs inside.
They include neither the man thought to be the brains behind Friday night’s attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, nor another wanted man, Abdeslam Salah.
The hardscrabble area in western Brussels where he grew up has always been considered a focal point of Islamic radicalism and the recruitment of foreign fighters to go to Iraq and Syria.
On April 19, French authorities said they thwarted a plot to attack a church in the Paris suburb of Villejuif after the alleged perpetrator apparently shot himself in the leg and called police.
“It’s necessary to establish direct contact with the French and work with them as allies”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said as France prepared to send an aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean. He described it as potentially a “gigantic step” toward deeper worldwide cooperation against IS.
France – and the rest of Europe – remains on edge.
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Lower Saxony state Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said the match was called off after “vague” information that solidified late in the day. “We knew it was terrorists trying to shoot at the police”. Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson in Saint-Denis, Philippe Sotto, Sylvie Corbet, Lori Hinnant, Angela Charlton and Jill Lawless in Paris and David Rising in Berlin also contributed.
