French President Francois Hollande has said the terrorists targeted “youth in all its diversity”.
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Nine days after the Paris attacks, the suspected ringleader has been killed in a hail of bullets and four of the seven gunmen and suicide bombers have been identified, but many questions remain unanswered.
The main suspect in coordinating the Paris attacks, Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed in Wednesday’s raid on an apartment in Saint-Denis. He had bragged in the Islamic State group’s English-language magazine that he was able to move in and out of Europe undetected.
It describes a 25-year-old born in Idlib, a rebel-held city in north-west Syria, and the Paris prosecutor’s office said fingerprints from the attacker match those of a person who travelled through Greece last month.
In retaliation, the French Air Force carried out bombing missions over IS’s stronghold in Syria Raqqa on Sunday and Monday against strategic targets.
Speaking before Hollande’s trip, which will be followed by a visit to Russian Federation later in the week, French officials made no secret of their desire to see the United States do more.
Some 350 people were also wounded in last Friday’s attacks, many severely. Abdelhamid Abaaoud was the mastermind in the Paris attacks. But Friday, the French TV Station iTele said it was an unidentified man, not a woman, who blew himself up during the shootout with police.
The hunt is still on in Europe for the eighth assailant in the Paris terrorist attacks, Salah Abdeslam.
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.
Investigators believed that Hasna was the one wearing the suicide vest, but further investigation has shown that the woman was not the suicide bomber.
But there’s a catch: The French rampage did not appear to involve Syrian attackers, but rather Europeans who had gone to Syria and returned radicalised and battle-ready to wreak havoc in their homelands.
Molins said investigators were still trying to identify the recipient of the message.
Greek officials said someone bearing Al Mohammad’s passport was processed on the island of Leros, having arrived there from Turkey. Abaaoud was thought to have been in Syria – where he had boasted of planning attacks on the West.
Diesel, a French police dog, was also killed in the raid, which took place after Abaaoud was tracked by officers watching Aitboulahcen.
Another friend of the brothers also said the men weren’t practicing Muslims and that they used to drink. The reports say he was even stopped briefly at least once at the Belgian border before he was officially linked to the Paris killings.
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Britain’s interior minister, Theresa May, said the EU must quickly implement beefed-up border security measures already agreed on, saying there was a clear link between tightened borders and the safety of Europeans.
