Police originally thought he was in Syria but their investigation led them to the Saint Denis apartment.
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Abaaoud’s failure so soon after the successful Charlie Hebdo attacks may have galvanised him to organise and conduct an even more spectacular assault like the one in Paris last week, van Buuren added.
The narrative provided by French officials raised questions about how a wanted militant suspected of involvement in multiple plots could slip into Europe undetected.
But it was only three days after the Paris bloodbath that “intelligence services of a country outside Europe indicated they had knowledge of his presence in Greece”, Cazeneuve said, without specifying which country.
However, a senior Greek security official has now insisted there was no record of him passing through the country, which is at the forefront of Europe’s immigration crisis, although he could not rule out him having entered on a false passport.
“It is the same terrorists under different names who are fighting us and who we are fighting”.
France’s Senate has voted to extend a state of emergency for three months after last week’s deadly attacks.
“We do not know at this stage whether Abaaoud blew himself up or not”, Molins’s office said.
Police supported a woman’s body was located immediately in a hunt of the flat following morning’s raid, but failed to give her individuality.
Along the way, Abaaoud, 27, is believed to have organised a string of attacks that made him the most talked-about – and, in jihadist circles, feted – terrorist since Osama bin Laden. Friends of her family in their hometown of Aulnay-sous-Bois, on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, said she had lived there until recently. “The investigation will establish precisely how this Belgo-Moroccan was involved”.
Its imam, Rachid Abou Houdeyfa, who has condemned the Paris attacks, achieved notoriety this year for telling children they could be turned into pigs for listening to music.
Investigators are also probing links to an attempted attack on a high-speed train in August that was thwarted when passengers overpowered the gunman. A suspected eighth person, Salah Abdeslam is still on the run.
An official in the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said raids related to Hadfi targeted people in his “entourage”.
By Abaaoud’s own account of what happened, published in the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, the two men killed in the raid had been “together in the safe house and had their weapons and explosive ready”.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Belgian court earlier this year after being tried in absentia for recruiting for Daesh.
Abaaoud, a former drug dealer from the same borough of Brussels, had been on the radar of Western security forces since early 2014, when he moved to Syria, apparently via Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany, and began starring in ghoulish propaganda videos filmed by the Islamic State.
News of Abaaoud’s death seemed to ease some tension in a country deeply shocked by the attacks, though officials said the aftermath was far from over.
Speaking to the French Parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly, Manuel Valls stated that they know that Abaaoud, the mastermind behind the threats was among the dead. Eight people, including a woman, were arrested, five police officers were slightly injured and a police dog was killed.
” As we have said before, as we close one door, we open another”.
European Union interior and justice ministers are to meet in Brussels on Friday where they will tighten checks on all travellers at the external borders of the 26-nation Schengen zone as an emergency measure.
“It is urgent that Europe wakes up, organises itself and defends itself against the terrorist threat”, Cazeneuve told reporters.
Hollande is also going to Washington and Moscow next week to push for a stronger global coalition against IS.
November 13, 2015 – 129 people are killed and hundreds of others are wounded in a series of attacks in Paris.
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Raf Casert and John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels; Thomas Adamson, Samuel Petrequin, Angela Charlton and Jamey Keaten in Paris; and Bassem Mroue also contributed.
