French and other Western intelligence agencies face an urgent challenge to track down the surviving members of the three Islamic State units who inflicted the unprecedented bloodshed in France and, perhaps more importantly, to target their distant commanders in IS-controlled parts of Syria.
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“It’s a good thing, but we don’t think the entire network has been taken down”, he said.
Officials had said on Wednesday that two people were killed in the raid, including a female suicide bomber who blew herself up. However, he said France will “do the necessary verifications” to make sure refugees entering the country don’t pose a security risk.
Hollande said he understands the call for demanding action in order to neutralise terrorist groups. Elsewhere in Europe, jittery leaders and law enforcement moved to protect their populations as Rob Wainwright, director of the European Union’s police coordination organization Europol, warned of “a very serious escalation” of the terror threat in Europe. Mohamed Abdeslam, who said he lived with his brother in Brussels, said his brother behaved normally in the days leading up to the assault.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian militant who had boasted of mounting attacks in Europe for the Islamic State (IS), was accused of orchestrating last Friday’s coordinated bombings and shootings in the French capital, which killed 129 people.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told France Inter radio that a few victims have yet to be identified.
A few 500 people are on Belgium’s list of “radicalized” people, and about 30 people are known to have traveled to Syria as potential foreign fighters in the Molenbeek neighborhood, a major source of extremists.
Moroccan authorities, who have detained scores of Islamic State militants in recent months, also arrested Abaaoud’s brother Yassine last month after he arrived in Agadir, a Moroccan security source said on Friday.
French authorities are now hunting at least one additional attacker after surveillance video showed three men in a auto used for an assault on Paris restaurants and bars.
Such a ceasefire would free nations supporting Syria’s various factions to concentrate more on the Islamic State, which is ineligible for the truce and has come under greater military scrutiny since Friday’s attacks in Paris.
On Wednesday, President François Hollande announced at a gathering of French mayors that local police forces that requested them would be provided with weapons and bulletproof jackets, taken from the stocks of the national police.
In a statement, the prosecutor’s office said that Abaaoud’s body was found in an apartment building targeted in the raid in Saint-Denis north of Paris Wednesday. It contained a text message sent about 20 minutes after the massacre began.
PARIS-French police launched dozens of fresh raids across the country Tuesday and warplanes bombed Islamic State jihadists in Syria after President Francois Hollande vowed a merciless fight against the group that attacked Paris. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Then two more explosions.
An extension to emergency anti-terrorism powers is being considered by French lawmakers.
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Casert reported from Brussels.
