Information obtained on November 19 suggested “that the two attackers – Abaaoud and the man we found by his side in the apartment – were planning an attack consisting of blowing themselves up at La Defense either on Wednesday the 18th or Thursday the 19th”, Molins said.
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The alleged mastermind behind the November 13 attacks in Paris planned another attack for the following week, prosecutor Francois Molins said Tuesday.
The ringleader of the Paris attacks returned to the scene of the shootings and was near the Bataclan concert hall while police were still trying to oust the gunmen who killed 89 people there, the Paris prosecutor said on Tuesday.
Returning to Abaaoud, thought to be an Islamic State operative who had planned other attacks in Europe, the prosecutor said telephone analysis showed he had returned to the scene of the Paris atrocities while the bloody siege at the Bataclan concert venue was still under way.
Police raided the apartment November 18, and three people were killed – including suspected attacks orchestrator Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a female cousin and one other.
As reported, the raid took place in an apartment in the medieval heart of the northern Paris suburb of St. Denis before dawn on Wednesday in order to find the Belgian man suspected of orchestrating the Paris terrorist attacks’.
An accompanying police wanted poster described Abrini as “dangerous and probably armed”.
The Brussels prosecutor also gave details of two people previously charged with terrorist offences and said that a fifth, unnamed, person had been charged on Tuesday. Bendaoud has told a French television station that he had been asked to host two people in his apartment for three days, but he didn’t know they were affiliated with terrorism.
In Belgium, four people have been handed terrorism charges since the Paris attacks, which have been traced to a network of people with ties to both France and Belgium.
Brussels remained at its highest alert level Tuesday, after Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel cited a “serious and imminent threat” to the city, which houses the headquarters of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
Abdeslam remains at large, 11 days after the carnage in Paris.
Meanwhile an arrest warrant was issued in Belgium for a man named Mohamed Abrini over the attacks.
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Authorities said the device, which did not have a detonator, was found in the southern Paris suburb of Montrouge. A police official said the vest contained bolts and the same type of explosive used in the November 13 attacks that claimed 130 lives and left hundreds wounded.
