The Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Tuesday that the man believed to have orchestrated the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had planned more attacks before he was killed by police on November 18.
Advertisement
Abaaoud was killed in a massive police raid on an apartment in northern Paris five days after the attacks. His female cousin, Hasna Ait Boulahcen, died of asphyxia apparently from the explosive vest detonated by a third person, who hasn’t been identified, the prosecutor said.
Molins also revealed Abaaoud is believed to have returned to the sites of some of the attacks, including the Bataclan concert hall, while police special forces were at the scene.
At least 130 people died in the Islamic State’s coordinated attacks in Paris on November 13.
Abaaoud’s cellphone was traced to the 10th, 11th and 12th Districts while the hostage situation at the Bataclan concert hall continued, Molins said. 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.
Increased security measures in the wake of the massacre in Paris have virtually shut down the Belgian capital, with the subway system, many shops and schools remaining shut.
Fearing a similar attack, Belgium maintained an unprecedented security lockdown in Europe’s capital Brussels, with Prime Minister Charles Michel warning that the threat “remains serious and imminent”, though schools and the Metro will reopen today.
The prosecutor said a French citizen named as Ali O, 31, living in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, who had been arrested, had picked Abdeslam up in a vehicle after Amri and Attou brought him back to Brussels on November 14.
Some believe Abdeslam was using a support network in Belgium to avoid being captured, more than a week after an worldwide arrest warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the Paris attacks.
Firecrews and decontamination teams attended a major mosque in Brussels close to the European Union headquarters on Thursday to investigate a suspect powder that police later said turned out to be flour. Two days before the attacks, Mohamed Abrini, 30, was caught on security footage at a gas station with Salah Abdeslam, a brother of one of the dead attackers. Hollande will discuss the crisis with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday after meeting U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday.
At a joint news conference, Hollande said he and Obama shared a “relentless determination to fight terrorism anywhere and everywhere”.
“Our investigation on that is still ongoing, to determine if Salah was planning on a suicide attack in the 18th arrondissement and why it didn’t happen”, Molins said.
French experts are trying to determine whether an object found in a garbage can in a Paris suburb is a suicide vest like those used by the ISIS jihadists who carried out the recent terrorist attacks on the city.
Advertisement
A street cleaner in a Paris suburb found an explosive vest on Monday near the place where Abdeslam’s mobile phone was found, raising the possibility that he aborted his mission.
