She detonated a suicide belt early on Wednesday during the seven-hour police assault on the building.
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“It was a big surprise when the intelligence came in”, one French police official told AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information was sensitive.
Shell-shocked Parisians honored the 130 victims Friday night with candles and dancing, marking exactly a week since attackers opened fire on sidewalk cafes and exploded suicide vests at the national stadium and an iconic rock concert venue.
A demonstration planned for Friday at France’s oldest mosque to show inter-community solidarity after the attacks was canceled for security concerns. Its imam, Rachid Abou Houdeyfa, who has strongly condemned the Paris attacks, achieved notoriety earlier this year after telling children they could be turned into pigs for listening to music.
Dozens of artists, writers, musicians and other cultural figures, including singer Charles Aznavour, journalist Anne Sinclair and former French Culture Minister Jack Lang, urged people to turn on their lights, light candles and play music at 9:20 p.m., around the time the attacks began on November 13.
The three-month extension of emergency laws would grant the French government powers to conduct stops and searches, ban large gatherings in public places, and put suspected extremists under house arrest.
Since the attacks, requests for information about joining the French army have surged.
French investigators into last Friday’s killings are pursuing “a number of leads” uncovered by Europol, Wainwright said.
In Germany, where the threat of a terrorist attack forced the cancellation of an worldwide soccer match Tuesday, politicians studied plans to deploy the army to aid the police and protect possible terrorist targets, including train stations and stadiums. Seven assailants died in the attacks and a suspected eighth is still on the run. They had believed he was in Syria until receiving a tipoff Monday that he was in France.
Abaaoud was one of Islamic State’s highest-profile European recruits, appearing in its slick online English-language magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of crossing European borders to stage attacks.
Police in France have carried out 793 raids since last week’s attacks, the interior ministry revealed. “It’s not an option, it’s an obligation”, said Luxembourg’s domestic security minster, Etienne Schneider, who chaired the meeting in Brussels.
French President Francois Hollande told a conference that everything is being done to free the remaining captives.
While quickly tracking Abaaoud down will be seen as a major success for French authorities, his presence in Paris will focus more attention on the difficulty European security services have in monitoring the continent’s borders.
The development comes as European Union interior and justice ministers met for an emergency meeting in Brussels on Friday to discuss ways of tightening EU border controls, including for the Schengen area, where passport-free travel is allowed for citizens of 26 out of the 28 member nations of the political bloc.
He said the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, has agreed to propose changes, by the end of the year, to existing rules which prohibit systematic checks of EU citizens at the border. They sang and danced on Place de la Republique, in the heart of a trendy neighborhood where scores of people were killed, majority in the attack on the Bataclan concert hall. The attacks, claimed by the Islamic State group, were the deadliest violence in decades and have left the city profoundly shaken.
Russian warplanes again struck jihadi targets in Syria overnight, firing cruise missiles from warships in the Caspian Sea into Isis-controlled territory in what Moscow called an “aerial campaign of retribution” for the deaths of all 224 passengers in a Russian plane death over Sinai this month.
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The EU meeting came as troops battled militants in Mali, where France has been helping local forces fight a jihadist uprising since 2013. “I understand in the fight against terrorism, people want to go far, but we still have to be cautious”, he said.
