“This is urgent”, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
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Confirmation that Abaaoud was in Paris will focus more attention on European security services, who ahead of Friday’s attacks had thought he was still in Syria.
One of the police sources also said Abaaoud had been caught on camera at a suburban metro station, after the shootings and at cafes and restaurants in central Paris but while a massacre in the Bataclan concert hall was still underway.
The phone contained a text message sent to somebody French officials believe was Abaaoud about the time the attack started, saying: “It’s on”.
French media have cast doubt on the possibility that the female cousin of the presumed ringleader of the Paris attacks blew herself up in Wednesday’s police raid in the Saint-Denis suburb.
A lawyer representing Abaaoud’s father said on Friday her client wished his son was taken alive so he could question him about the whereabouts of his younger brother.
Police investigating the attacks raided a property northeast of Paris where Aitboulahcen had lived with her mother and siblings. “We must not rule anything out”, Valls said.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the intelligence “led us to believe that, considering their armaments, the structured organisation and their determination, they were ready to act”. The death toll of 130 does not include any of the attackers who died.
Also Thursday, a Belgian official said security forces have conducted nine raids and detained nine people linked to the deadly Paris attacks.
Greek police were looking for Abaaoud in Athens in January, after a Belgian police raid in the eastern town of Verviers broke up a cell planning attacks.
In a related development, France’s National Assembly voted Thursday to extend a state of emergency by three months in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said a few of those involved in the attacks had taken advantage of the migration crisis in Europe – which has seen thousands of asylum seekers arrive on the continent – to “slip into” France unnoticed.
Police sources said a tip-off from Moroccan intelligence had helped track Abaaoud to the apartment building where he died.
Eight people were arrested following the raid in Saint-Denis.
As an increasingly detailed picture emerges of a network of European-born jihadists with ties to Syria, investigators are working around the clock to find Salah Abdeslam, an eighth gunman who is still on the run.
Cazeneuve said the 28-nation bloc must move forward on a long-delayed system for collecting and exchanging airline passenger information, data he said is vital “for tracing the return of foreign fighters” from Syria and Iraq.
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A draft resolution for Friday’s European Union meeting says ministers will agree to implement “necessary systematic and co-ordinated checks at external borders, including on individuals enjoying the right of free movement”. His suicide-bomber brother Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up at a cafe without killing anyone.
