At least two dead in operation targeting suspected Paris attacks mastermind
Seven arrests made as woman blows herself up and man is killed by grenade during raid on apartment in St-Denis, north of Paris
At least two people have been killed and seven arrested during a major seven-hour police operation targeting the alleged mastermind of last week’s terror attacks in Paris.
A woman blew herself up by detonating an explosive vest, and a man was killed by a grenade during the raid on an apartment in St-Denis, north of Paris.
François Molins, the Paris public prosecutor, said the operation was launched after phone taps and surveillance led police to believe Abdel-Hamid Aba Oud, the suspected mastermind of the bloody wave of suicide bombings and shootings that left 129 people dead and more than 350 injured on Friday, might be in the apartment.
Citing police sources, French media reported that the woman who blew herself up was Aba Oud’s cousin. Authorities said they could not yet confirm the 27-year-old Belgian extremist, who moved to Syria in 2014 to fight with Isis but is known to have returned to Europe at least once since, had been in the flat.
Seven people were arrested during the raid, launched at 4.20am by more than 100 heavily armed anti-terrorist police and Swat teams. Three men were pulled half-naked from the apartment, on an upper floor of a block in the rue de Corbillon, and two more seized later while hiding in rubble inside the building. None has so far been identified.
The landlord of the apartment, identified as Jawad Bendaoud, and a female friend, were arrested in the street nearby. He told reporters before being led away that “a friend” had “asked me to put up two of his friends for a few days … I didn’t know they were terrorists.” The woman said the two visitors arrived “two days ago”.
Two of those arrested were taken to hospital.
President François Hollande held an emergency cabinet at the Élysée Palace to monitor the raid. Addressing a gathering of France’s mayors later in the day, he said Wednesday’s shootout had confirmed France was “in a war ... what these terrorists wanted to target was what France represents”.
“That’s what was attacked on 13 November. These barbarians targeted France in its diversity. It is the youth of France that was targeted, because quite simply it represents life.”
The French interior ministry said police had searched a further 118 addresses across the country under France’s state of emergency on Tuesday night, leading to 25 arrests and the seizure of 34 weapons. A total of 414 houses have been raided and 60 people detained since Sunday, with 120 more under house arrest.
Frightened St-Denis residents said they had been woken up soon after 4am. Fatima Bourahli, 26, wore a coat over her pyjamas as she stood in the street while the raid was under way. Soldiers in camouflage with automatic weapons crouched nearby.
“My daughter is six and she’s scared and confused,” she said. “The schools here are shut today, children are staying home. People are really scared and pretty tense. The government says we’re at war.”
Djamila Khaldi, a 54-year-old cleaner, lives near the famous Basilica of St-Denis, not far from the street targeted in the raid at the heart of the town’s historic centre.
“I was up before 4am because I had to drive my daughter to the airport,” she said. “I heard the shots and I just thought there must be some kind of standoff, terrorists must be hiding here.
“What can you say? Terrorism has come to St-Denis, the mood has changed and it will stay that way. People are distrustful, looking at each other. St-Denis will be labelled for this now. It’s a real shame.”
Wednesday’s operation came after a mobile phone, found in a dustbin near the Bataclan concert hall where 89 people died, was found with a map of the music venue targeted in one of the attacks. A text message on the phone sent at 9.42pm on Friday, as the Bataclan attack began, said: “Off we go, here we go again.”
Police were still hunting Salah Abdeslam, a French national living in Belgium, whose brother, Brahim, blew himself up in the Paris attacks, and an unidentified “ninth attacker” sought since Tuesday night.
The existence of a so-called “ninth attacker” was unknown to investigators until CCTV was found on Tuesday showing three men in a car – not two as previously believed – opening fire with assault rifles on patrons at two of the bars and restaurants that were among the targets of the Paris attacks.
Police had previously said that at least eight people were directly involved in the bloodshed: seven who died in the attacks, and Salah Abdeslam, who narrowly escaped arrest during a routine police control on Saturday morning, hours after the attack, near the Belgian border.
France and the rest of Europe remained on a high state of alert. In the US, two Air France flights en route to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris were diverted because of anonymous bomb threats. Both were searched and later cleared for departure.
In Hanover, Germany, a football friendly between the national side and Holland was cancelled 90 minutes before kick-off on Tuesday night after what the German foreign minister, Thomas de Maizière, described as “concrete evidence” of a bomb plot emerged,
Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was due to attend the match but was flown back to Berlin when the terror threat was announced, said on Wednesday it was the right decision to cancel the game.
“These are difficult decisions,” she said, “possibly the most difficult decisions, between freedom and security. But yesterday the decision was taken in favour of security, and that’s right.”
Police and justice officials have said the carefully planned series of attacks, the deadliest in France since the second world war, were carried out by a militant cell in Belgium in close contact with Islamic State in Syria, which was quick to claim responsibility for the killings as retaliation for French air raids in Syria and Iraq over the past year.
Two suspects being held in Brussels, Mohammed Amri, 27, and Hamza Attou, 21, have admitted driving to France to pick up Salah Abdeslam and bring him home to Molenbeek, a suburb of the Belgian capital long known as a hotbed of extremism, early on Saturday.
They are being held on charges of terrorist murder and conspiracy, with Belgian media reporting that traces of ammonium nitrate, a fertiliser that can be used to make explosives, were recovered from their homes.
Prosecutors have identified five of the seven attackers who died: four Frenchmen – Omar Ismaïl Mostefai, 29, Samy Amimour, 28, and Bilal Hadfi, 20, all of whom had recently spent time in Syria – and a foreigner who was fingerprinted in Greece last month and later claimed asylum in Serbia. He was carrying a Syrian passport, possibly fake, in the name of Ahmad Almohammad.
Hollande has called for a global coalition to defeat the jihadis and launched major airstrikes on Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital in northern Syria, on three successive nights, with 10 French warplanes again attacking two Islamic State command centres on Wednesday.
The aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle left the French naval port of Toulon on Wednesday morning for the eastern Mediterranean, where its presence will triple Fracne’s air strike capacity.
Russia has also intensified its attacks on Isis targets in Syria after it confirmed an earlier Isis claim that a bomb was responsible for the downing of a passenger airliner over Sinai last month, killing 224 people.
The Syrian Observatory for Human rights said on Wednesday that the combined French and Russian bombardments had killed 33 jihadis in the past 72 hours and the families of Isis fighters were fleeing Raqqa for the city of Mosul, which they believed to be safer.
Hollande is due to meet the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on 26 November, two days after flying to Washington to meet the US president, Barack Obama, to strengthen the countries’ cooperation against Isis.
