Having established how the attacks against a soccer stadium, sidewalk cafes and a rock concert were carried out, investigators were still piecing together details on the assailants and how they converged in the French capital.
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The police source said that the suicide bomber was in fact a man, not a woman.
Officials said Abdeslam entered Austria from Germany November 9 with two unidentified companions and they were stopped for a routine traffic check.
It’s not known whether Al-Mohammad is the man’s real name. 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.
Belgium’s government crisis center has raised the terrorism alert to its highest level, amid concerns that at least one suspect in the Paris attacks may be at large in Belgium. Police announced Friday a third individual had been found in the rubble.
A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban Paris apartment where the suspected mastermind of last week’s attacks was believed to be holed up, police said.
She, Abaaoud and one other as-yet-identified person were killed in the apartment raid.
French Interior Bernard Cazeneuve is exhorting his European Union partners to toughen the bloc’s borders and move forward on a long-delayed system for collecting airline passenger information. “I knew she was lost”. They told the BBC they couldn’t believe she would have blown herself up.
Abaaoud was wanted in Belgium where he had been convicted in absentia of recruiting foreign fighters for the Islamic State group and kidnapping his brother, who he persuaded to join him in Syria at age 13. There, in the picturesque suburbs anchored by the Seine River and the Clichy bridge, Aitboulahcen was born to Moroccan immigrants.
In Brussels, an exasperated France prodded the rest of Europe to take fresh steps to shut down the exploitation of the region’s porous borders by an emerging network of homegrown jihadists who are spiriting undetected between the continent and the battlefields of the Middle East.
French artists and cultural figures are calling for people to mark a week since the start of the Paris attacks with an outpouring of “noise and light”. Senator Dick Durbin of IL, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, said that several of the Paris attackers were on no-fly lists, indicating they were well-known to United States intelligence as well.
A person in Belgium familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press that Brahim Abdeslam became “close” with Abaaoud while living in the Molenbeek neighborhood.
French lawmakers on Thursday voted to extend an extraordinary package of security measures for three months as Valls warned of “the risk from chemical or biological weapons”.
Britain’s interior minister, Theresa May, said the EU must quickly implement beefed-up border security measures already agreed on, saying there was a clear link between tightened borders and the safety of Europeans. Hollande will travel to Washington and Moscow later in the week to push for a stronger global coalition against IS.
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Abaaoud was killed on Wednesday in a massive police raid five days after a series of deadly attacks on Paris that left 129 people dead and over 350 wounded.
