In response, France would “intensify” operations in Syria, Hollande said a day after French jets pounded IS targets in the group’s Syrian stronghold of Raqa, its first military response to the Paris carnage.
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French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the police arrested 23 people and recovered a Kalashnikov and other weapons during the overnight raids.
Seven attackers died in the assault on the French capital, majority after detonating suicide belts.
Another fighter says “we congratulate the oppressed Muslims worldwide for this sacred act that our brothers carried out against the enemies of religion”.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, seen Saturday with President François Hollande, says the upcoming global climate change conference is still scheduled to take place in Paris. An worldwide arrest warrant has been issued for a Belgian-born Frenchman believed involved in the attacks and who is still at large, according to AP.
One of the individuals they’re looking for, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is said to be the mastermind behind the attacks. The prosecutor’s office said fingerprints from the attacker match those of someone who passed through Greece in October.
Six separate attacks across Paris on Friday left over 130 people dead.
Police stopped him hours after the attacks in a vehicle on his way toward the Belgian border but let him go because he apparently hadn’t yet been linked to the terrorist operation.
Describing the coordinated attacks that killed 129 people as “acts of war”, Hollande urged a global fightback to crush IS and said he would hold talks with his U.S. and Russian counterparts on a new offensive.
The two, about whom officials gave no details, face charges of leading a terrorist attack and taking part in the activities of a terrorist organization.
He said France has a simultaneous duty to ensure “humanity for refugees and protection of the French people”.
The iconic Eiffel Tower lit up in Paris on Monday night in the colours of the French flag.
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An Islamic State operative suspected of helping plan the Paris attacks had been monitored in Syria by Western allies seeking to kill him in an airstrike, but they couldn’t locate him in the weeks before the plot was carried out, two Western security officials said.
