Belgium has filed terror charges against a third suspect relating to the Paris attacks.
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French police on Saturday freed seven people arrested during a massive raid on an apartment housing the ringleader of the Paris attacks, prosecutors said. That man carried a Syrian passport naming him as Ahmad Al-Mohammad, though it’s unclear whether it was authentic.
Moroccan authorities have arrested scores of suspected Islamic State militants in recent months.
European officials earlier acknowledged that French police stopped Abdeslam the morning after Friday’s attacks at the Belgian border but then let him go.
Initial news reports said Aitboulahcen detonated a suicide belt or vest she was wearing.
Brussels will again see its metro and many shops closed, as well as schools, while offices in a city that is also home to the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation are likely to have few staff after the prime minister warned of imminent Paris-style attacks.
The Minister said, “Today we stand in solidarity with France, the French people and all those who have suffered at the hands of terrorists”. Attention now shifts to the suspected terrorist who has been on the run since the night of the killings and is the most-wanted man in Europe-Salah Abdeslam.
Cazeneuve said the 28-nation bloc must move forward on a long-delayed system for collecting and exchanging airline passenger information, data he said is vital “for tracing the return of foreign fighters” from Syria and Iraq. “They expect something to happen, but don’t know where”, said Nathalie Goulet, who heads up the French Senate’s investigation committee into jihadi networks.
This raised questions, including the possibility that Salah Abdeslam may have been supposed to blow himself up in Paris but had had second thoughts, the lawyer added.
The French National Assembly votes to extend the state of emergency for three months while Belgium announces a 400-million-euro ($425.60 million) security crackdown.
“They simply don’t have the same means as Britain’s MI5 or the DGSI (French intelligence agency)”, said Louis Caprioli, a former head of the DST, France’s former anti-terrorism unit.
It has also been confirmed that his cousin, Hasna Ait Aitboulahcen, 26, died during the raid.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said this week that three cars, the Seat, a Polo and a Renault Clio, arrived in convoy from Belgium on the eve of the attacks.
French authorities said police had conducted 793 raids since last week’s attacks.
Hundreds of heavily armed officers raided the apartment complex in Saint Denis at dawn on Wednesday, triggering the massive firefight and explosions.
Some lit candles and sang.
“It is reasonable to assume… that further attacks are likely”, Wainwright told a hearing in the European Parliament in Brussels Thursday.
He claimed to have escaped a continent-wide manhunt after a police raid in Belgium in 2013 in which two other militants were killed.
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Meanwhile, President Hollande will travel to Washington and Moscow in the coming week to push for a stronger worldwide coalition against the extremists.
