Authorities also believe Abaaoud is in part responsible for organizing the attacks on November 13 that killed at least 130 and injured hundreds more at six locations in Paris.
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Hasna Aitboulahcen, a 26-year-old woman who said she was Abaaoud’s cousin and a third unidentified person were also killed.
“I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s, but they never attacked innocent women and children indiscriminately”, he said, according to The Hill.
“These individuals took advantage of the refugee crisis… of the chaos, perhaps, for a few of them to slip in” to France, he told French TV.
France has called for inter-European flights to be included in the data sweep and wants the information it retains – names, credit card details, itinerary and other personal data -to be kept for one year instead of one month.
On November 16, just days after the Paris attacks, French authorities get a tip off from Moroccan intelligence that Abaaoud was still on French soil.
France’s Republican Guard will carry a photograph of every victim of the attacks.
The UN Security Council Friday urged its members to ramp up their fight against Islamic State jihadists after the Paris attacks, as Europe said it would tighten border checks and Brussels issued its highest terror alert.
A new counter-terrorism centre at Europol, starting in January, would help, he said: “The key to respond to such a complex and now clearly an worldwide threat of the dimension that we’ve seen is information sharing – the ability to collect and connect the right intelligence at the right time”. The fingerprints of Brahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up after attacking a cafe, were on another of the AK47s.
Police across Europe are also hunting Salah Abdeslam who made it to Belgium from France in a VW Golf the day after the attacks, despite being stopped by French police along the way.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said this week that the three cars, including a Polo and a Clio, arrived in convoy from Belgium on the eve of the attacks. They sang and danced on Place de la Republique, in the heart of a trendy neighbourhood where scores of people were killed, majority in the attack on the Bataclan concert hall.
Also on Friday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced that one more person had died from last Friday’s attacks in Paris.
“We’ve waited far too long to adopt such measures”, the French official said, adding that a draft reform of the Schengen code will be proposed by the end of the year “to allow systematic and obligatory checks to be carried out at all our external borders and on all people entering the Schengen area, including those who benefit from the freedom of movement”.
Demonstrations have been banned in the city since the attacks, but Parisians have been spontaneously gathering all week outside the restaurants, cafes and concert hall hit in the attacks to leave flowers, light candles or hold quiet vigils.
During a joint session of Parliament at the Château de Versailles, Hollande emphasized that France is at war and proposed to extend the state of emergency he declared right after the Paris terrorist attacks for three months. The measure now goes to the Senate, where it will likely be approved.
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Hollande will travel to Washington to speak with Obama on Tuesday and then head to Moscow to meet with Putin to discuss how their countries’ militaries might work together.
