Sunday 15 November 2015

FRANCE: Weapons And Fingerprints Found In Vehicle After Paris Shootings,

Omar Ismail Mostefai has been named by French police as one of the gunmen after a series of coordinated terror attacks which killed 129 and injured 352 across Paris on Friday.

Abdallah Benali (L), president of the association Generation 2000 Mosque of Luce, and Vice President Karim Benaya, talk in front of the Mosque of Luce, near Chartres, central France. The mosque was frequented by Omar Ismael Mostefai, one of the suicide bombers who took part in the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris
A witness of the immediate aftermath of the arrests said that authorities feared an explosion and brought experts from the gas company in case of an incident, Gregory Walton and Camilla Turner in Brussels report.

Maartin Bijens said: "I didn't see what happened but I did see that they closed the roads.

"I was here but I saw all the police here and the bomb squad. They said that everyone should stay inside and nobody could go outside or come in. They said there were terrorists and explosives, the Ovo bomb disposal were here. They just looked to see if there were explosives - I don't know if they found anything.

"There was a truck from the gas company. I think they closed off the gas in case there was an explosion. They were worried there might be an explosion.

"It was finished at 6.30pm, they got here just before 4.30pm. I saw on the news pictures of the guy they arrested, he was wearing a mask and was of North African origin.

"We always have a lot of police coming by."

One witness of yesterday's arrests by Osseghem metro station in Brussels who had just returned from work said that police were jumpy in the moments after the operation.

Wan Chen, a 49-year-old restaurant worker, said: "They were brandishing at him [one of those arrested] like this, shouting 'sit down, sit down'. We were scared and didn't know what to do and everybody was scared. I didn't know him.

"They were shouting at everyone. There were at least four or five around here. He was sat like this on the ground (his hands crossed). They did not explain anything about what was happening. They were just saying you cannot go inside, they were shouting 'get out'.

"The others were taken out. They stopped me coming up, they said 'you cannot go inside'. The police took a camera of a journalist. I think he was a journalist. He just tried to take a picture and they took it away. The police was nervous. They were paying special attention."

"This area has had it before because the man from the Thayls incident (the thwarted terrorist attack) was from near here. I am scared it could happen again but life goes on."

Belgian number plate on car found

A middle-aged local woman said she was told by neighbours that a Belgian woman who lived nearby had spotted the car and noticed it had a Belgian number plate, report Lexi Finnigan and Patrick Sawer.

"She's Belgian herself and she thought it was a bit odd because she hadn't seen the car in the street before," she said.

"I am told she looked inside and noticed what looked like weapons in the back. That's when she contacted the police.

"They came and took the car away but you can still see the smashed glass all over the street where it was."

The car was discovered in Rue Edouard Vaillant in Montreuil, a commune in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

Meanwhile in London, Clare Short, Labour's former secretary of state for international development, has warned that Britain does not have a "coherent policy" to deal with Isil, writes Kate McCann.

The ex-MP, who resigned over the Iraq war, told Sky News that a decision to bomb Syria would be a "token gesture" that would show the UK up as a "non-player".

She said: "Western policy in incoherent, our allies ...have been arming these extremist Isil supporting organisations. We've got to make our mind up - is our job to get a ceasefire ... or are we so focused on getting rid of Assad we're letting the country get more and more chaotic?"

During the same programme Lord Carlile, who called on British Muslims to speak out against terrorism, said the Paris attacks will spell the end of the Schengen agreement of open borders across Europe.

The former independent reviewer of terrorism added that it so easily "could have been us".

Manuel Valls, the prime minister, says that 103 victims have been identified but that "20 to 30" are yet to be so, writes Henry Samuel in Paris.

Known terror suspect 'on security services' radar'

The holder of the Syrian passport found near the body of one of the terrorists travelled through Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, where he applied for asylum soon after he arrived on October 7. Named as A A in the French media, he was on the security services' radar but there was no warrant for his arrest, according to the reports.

Ismael Omar Mostafai, the French terrorist identified from his fingerprints, is believed to have spent several months in Syria in late 2013 and early 2014, a source close to the investigation said. Police have searched the home of one of his brothers in the Paris suburb of Bandoufle. Several of Mostafai's immediate family members are in custody.

Dropping bombs alone won't defeat Isil

Just dropping bombs on Syria will not defeat Isil, Hilary Benn, Labour's shadow foreign secretary, has warned, as he urged the government to "get on" with giving spooks more powers to intercept communications.

Mr Benn said the priority for the government must be to end the civil war in Syria, then we can turn our attention to defeating the terror threat posed by Isil.

He said that the UK must "continue to protect ourselves" as he backed the government's communications data bill which will give the secret services more power to access messages.

Mr Benn said "It is really important that the police and security services have the powers they need in order to continue to try and keep us safe,we know that technology has changed but the debate is how you balance that with the protection of our privacy.

Inside the black Seat Leon abandoned in Montreuil by the suspected restaurant killers, investigators found three Kalashnikovs.

This suggests that after the attack this group of terrorists tried to flee the capital, possibly dropping off a suicide bomber near Place de La Nation who went on to blow himself up at a cafe near Boulevard Voltaire. This suggests, according to police sources, that the attackers switched cars and fled in another vehicle probably towards Belgium - where three suspects were later arrested.

The three in Belgium had been stopped by chance by police near the border.

Weapons and fingerprints have apparently been found in a vehicle suspected of being involved in the Paris shootings.

Police put out an alert about the vehicle on Saturday and warned both police officers and the public not to approach the vehicle.

The car - the second vehicle police have found linked to Friday's attacks - was used in the shootings at the cafe on Rue Fontaine-au-Roi where five were killed and in the restaurant on Rue de Charonne, where 19 were gunned down, according to prosecutor Francois Molins.

Hong Kong and mainland China have advised Chinese citizens in France to be cautious, after at least 129 were killed in a series of attacks across Paris, writes Jennifer Pak in Shenzen.

The Hong Kong government has issued an "amber" travel alert for France, which is less severe than the Chinese administrative region’s black and red alerts.

In a statement, the Hong Kong security bureau advises residents in France to avoid travel to areas with large gatherings of people.

It also urges residents to cancel "non-essential travel” to Paris and Ile de France.

China’s national bureau of tourism estimates there were 1299 Chinese travellers in Paris at the time of the attack. It has also asked its nationals to exercise caution and to respect security provisions issued by the French authorities.

A US intelligence official has said that the Syrian passport recovered after Friday nights' attacks and believed to belong to one of the bombers may be a fake.

The official said the passport did not contain the correct numbers for a legitimate Syrian passport and the picture did not match the name.

If forgery is confirmed, the document in question could have come from one of several places:

In Turkey, the fake passport business is booming. For a one-off payment of around £1,000, it is possible to purchase a document that once belonged to someone else. In this case, a simple switch of the photograph opens the pathway to a whole new identity.

In other cases, smugglers obtain genuine blank passports stolen from government buildings in Syria amid the chaos of its internal conflict, as well as the machines for processing them.

Another possibility would be that the document was made up inside Isil-held territory itself. When the terror group seized control of major cities, it took over all government buildings, including passport offices.

Serbian media claims one of the terrorists was Ahmed Almuhamed.

The newspaper reports that the man was carrying a Syrian passport and is aged 25.

He is believed to have been blown himself up at the Bataclan concert all where more than 80 people were killed by gunmen during the siege on Friday.

Blic newspaper as reporting that the terrorist arrived with another bomber in Europe on the Greek island of Leros in October. It is then reported he took a month to travel to France and on October 7, entered Serbia after crossing from Macedonia.

Blic is reported to claim that he applied for asylum in Serbia before travelling on to Croatia and Austria.

Omar Ismail Mostefai who was known to police as little more than a petty criminal before his role in the Paris attacks.

Born on November 21 1985, in the poor Paris suburb of Courcouronnes, Mostefai's criminal record shows eight convictions for petty crimes between 2004 and 2010, but no jail time.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Mostefai had been singled out as a high-priority target for radicalisation in 2010 but, before Friday, he had "never been implicated in an investigation or a terrorist association".

Investigators are now probing whether he took a trip to Syria last year, according to police sources.

The killer's father and 34-year-old brother were placed in custody on Saturday evening and their homes were searched.

"It's a crazy thing, it's madness," his brother said, his voice trembling, before he has taken into custody.

"Yesterday I was in Paris and I saw how this shit went down."

The brother, one of four boys in the family along with two sisters, turned himself in to police after learning Mostefai was involved in the attacks.

While he had cut ties with Mostefai several years ago, and knew he had been involved in petty crimes, his brother said he had never imagined his brother could be radicalised.

The last he knew, Mostefai had gone to Algeria with his family and his "little girl," he said, adding: "It's been a time since I have had any news."

"I called my mother, she didn't seem to know anything," he said Saturday.

A source close to the enquiry said Mostefai regularly attended the mosque in Luce, close to Chartres, to the southwest of Paris.

An American student on exchange to France has been named as one of the victims of the attacks. Nohemi Gonzalez, 23, was studying design in Paris and was out with friends on Friday night when she was shot.

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