“All will be done to determine who is who, and based on the work of forensic police, we’ll tell you who was in the apartment – and what consequences it will have for the development of the investigation”. Because he won’t inflict terror any longer.
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CNN’s Atika Shubert contributed from Saint-Denis; Margot Haddad, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister contributed from Paris; Jethro Mullen reported and wrote from Hong Kong; Greg Botelho and Catherine E. Shoichet reported and wrote from Atlanta. But while residents of that Paris suburb told CNN they’d seen Abaaoud himself out recently and at a local mosque, authorities didn’t know for sure where he was. That second person, it turned out, was Abaaoud. After seven hours, police declared the operation was now over.
Six days after a coordinated string of shootings and bombings killed 129 people in the French capital, at least one suspect is still on the run. Regardless, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said about the Saint-Denis raid, “The target was achieved”.
Abaaoud – who hails from Molenbeek, a grimy Brussels district dubbed an extremist “hotbed” – was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison in July for running a network to recruit jihadists to Syria.
For one, at least one Paris terror suspect, Salah Abdeslam, is at large.
Valls did not say there was a specific threat involving such weapons.
Brahim Abdeslam, 31 (born July 30, 1984), French, resident of Belgium. It also made Abaaoud a household name here.
Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens also said he could not confirm whether Abaaoud was among those killed in the raid.
The dead were a woman who blew herself up with an explosive vest and a man hit by projectiles and grenades at the end of the raid, which began before dawn and continued for more than seven hours at the apartment building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. Eight people were arrested in the raid.
Molins, the Paris prosecutor, said Wednesday that investigators found a cellphone in a garbage can outside the Bataclan concert hall in eastern Paris where 89 of the victims of Friday’s carnage died.
Officials are piecing together where the terrorists were leading up to the attacks, and with whom they had contact.
Police focused on the flat after monitoring telephone calls and analysing text messages on mobile phones of those who had taken part in the attacks on 13 November, and of their associates.
Still, while many were sought after last week’s bloodshed, Abaaoud had been the top priority.
Belgian security officials began tracking him in March 2014 after he appeared in a video behind the wheel of a pickup truck dragging mutilated bodies to a mass grave. “Speaking at the European Parliament on Thursday, Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, said the attacks were “a clear statement of intent by ISIS to export its brutal brand of terrorism to Europe”.
A man arrested during the police operation said he had lent the apartment to the men as a favour to a friend.
Britain said one of the Royal Navy’s most advanced warships would support a French aircraft carrier that is on its way to join operations against IS militants in Syria.
He is thought to have escaped to Syria after a January police raid in Belgium, but he has bragged in Islamic State propaganda of his ability to move around undetected.
Asia-Pacific leaders called Thursday for governments to urgently increase cooperation in the fight against terrorism as they held annual talks overshadowed by the Paris attacks.
IS is a notoriously violent Islamist group which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.
It also left no doubt that other threats remained.
“We were then able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the crusaders”.
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French authorities have said most of the Friday attackers – five have been identified so far – were unknown to them. “The grim imagination of those giving the orders has no limit”.
