The European Union agreed on Friday to rush through reforms to the passport-free Schengen zone by the end of the year, amid growing concerns about border security in the wake of the Paris attacks.
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An worldwide arrest warrant did not stop him re-entering France undetected to take part in Friday’s attacks.
The French Senate is also expected to vote Friday afternoon to extend the state of emergency expanding police powers for three more months.
It was initially thought that Aitboulahcen blew herself up during the gunfight, but Paris prosecutors said she was killed in the police raid but was not a suicide bomber.
France has called for changes to the functioning of the EU’s Schengen border-free travel zone, which normally does not monitor the entry and exit of citizens of its 26 countries.
Sources say she may be the cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is believed to have coordinated the attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (left) is embraced by German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere during a meeting…
Abaaoud appeared in Islamic State’s slick online English-language magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of crossing European borders to stage attacks.
Frontex will be asked to “assist the member states to tighten controls of external borders to detect suspicious travels of foreign terrorist fighters and smuggling of firearms, in co-operation with Europol”.
Nine people were arrested in sweeps Thursday in Belgium in connection with the Paris attacks.
European countries agreed Friday to new steps aimed at securing Europe’s frontiers, as further evidence emerged that extremists in last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris were using the region’s porous borders to slip between the continent and the battlefields of the Middle East.
Documents prepared for the Friday meeting in Brussels and seen by The Associated Press indicate the ministers instead will try to push forward on priorities already identified, but not acted on, by European Union leaders following an earlier round of deadly attacks in Paris on a satirical newspaper and a kosher grocery in January.
Calling the PNR “absolutely vital”, the official said that intra-European flights must also be included into the record, and that the authorities should be allowed to keep passenger information for a longer period of time.
A petty criminal who went to fight in Syria in 2013, Abaaoud is believed to have recruited similar young men from immigrant families in his native Brussels district of Molenbeek and elsewhere in Belgium and France. The EU also has to control the influx of migrants coming in from Greece, Cazeneuve said, adding that the task to boost dialogue with Turkey and “speed up the return of people who do not benefit from worldwide protection” is also on the table. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Abaaoud was traced to the apartment in Saint-Denis through phone taps and surveillance. French and USA personnel entered the Radisson Blu Hotel in the capital Bamako after attackers with automatic weapons took 170 people hostage on Friday morning. One of the Paris suicide bombers, carrying what seems to have been a fake Syrian passport, was registered in Greece in October.
In an ominous address – echoing the debate in the U.S. Congress after the September 11, 2001, attacks – French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities must imagine that the grimmest threats are possible.
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Dozens of French artists, writers and musicians urged people to light candles and play music at exactly 9:20 p.m., the time the attacks began, in a show of defiance against the extremists.
