Kerry said, “we have to step up our efforts to hit them at the core where they’re planning these things and also obviously to do more on borders in terms the movement of people”.
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A USA official briefed on intelligence matters said Abaaoud was a key figure in an Islamic State external operations cell that US intelligence agencies have been tracking for months.
Kerry began Tuesday by meeting with diplomats from the U.S. Embassy to thank them for their service.
Declaring that “France is at war”, President Francois Hollande on Monday proposed sweeping new laws and more spending on public safety in response to Friday’s terror attacks in Paris – promising to eradicate terrorism, but not at the expense of France’s freedom. Metro trains stopped, pedestrians paused and office workers stood at their desks.
Yesterday’s raid was launched after a discarded mobile phone and tapped telephone conversations allowed investigators to identify a series of safe houses, with the suggestion that Abaaoud may have been holed up in an apartment less than a mile from the Stade de France, where one of the terror attacks took place.
“We know that more attacks are being prepared” against France “but also against other European countries”, Mr Valls told French radio station RTL.
During a press conference in Turkey, President Obama called the Islamic State, “the face of evil”. The lawyers for the two men could not confirm that authorities suspected them as the suppliers of the suicide bomb vests.
In his Versailles address, Hollande said the United States and Russian Federation needed to cooperate in attacking IS targets “to unify our strength and achieve a result that has been too long in coming”.
“It’s just a start”, Cazeneuve said. “That’s what they’re fleeing”, he said. He is the most high profile Frenchman with ISIS and considered the “Jihadi John” of France.
Reporting from Belgium, NPR’s Peter Kenyon says that there is a big police operation happening in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels. A source close to the investigation said she could have been a cousin of Abaaoud, Reuters reports. The other attackers so far named are all from Europe.
Meanwhile an global manhunt is underway for surviving members and accomplices of the Islamist group who are suspected to have carried out the attacks.
Another raid took place in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek on Monday targeting 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, who is suspected to have been the eighth terrorist that carried out the attacks on France’s national football stadium, the Bataclan concert venue and several restaurants and bars in Paris’s fashionable 10th and 11th districts on Friday.
One of Abdeslam’s brothers is reportedly among the individuals being detained, and another was allegedly one of the attackers in the three-hour massacre.
French police on Sunday released a photograph of a suspect related to Friday’s bloodbath in Paris, which claimed the lives of 129 innocent people and wounded hundreds more.
Abaaoud was also named in various media previous year as the elder brother of a 13-year-old boy who left Belgium to become a child-fighter in Syria.
However, there were also signs the city was trying to return to normal.
“He was a normal man”, said Christophe, his neighbor in Chartres. “Nothing made you think he would turn violent”.
Security officials have said Abaaoud may have first returned briefly to Europe in late 2013 and then returned before the attacks on French magazine Charlie Hebdo this January. While there was no clear link established, French prosecutors said fingerprints from one of the suicide bombers matched the prints of a man registered in Greece in October.
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A Greek official says the person holding Al-Mohammad’s passport was processed on the island of Leros after setting out from Turkey, staying there for five days before arriving by ship in Athens.
