FRANCE: Paris Attacks 'ringleader' Killed In Police Raid

The Islamic State jihadist suspected of orchestrating the Paris attacks was killed in a major police raid in the French capital, prosecutors confirmed Thursday, raising troubling questions about a breakdown in intelligence and European border security.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan origin linked to a series of extremist plots in Europe over the past two years, died in Wednesday's assault by police on an apartment in northern Paris.

The 28-year-old was thought to have been in Syria — where he had boasted of planning attacks on the West — and his presence in France will renew debate about Europe's border controls and monitoring of fighters returning from the war-torn country.

Confirmation that such a high-profile figure from the Islamic State (IS) group had slipped undetected into France prompted a sharp response from Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who demanded Europe step up its response to the terror threat.

He said Paris had received "no information" from other European countries about his arrival on the continent.

"It is urgent that Europe wakes up, organises itself and defends itself against the terrorist threat," Cazeneuve said.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said some of the attackers had taken advantage of Europe's migrant crisis to "slip in" unnoticed and warned the cherished passport-free Schengen zone would be in danger if the bloc did not improve border controls.

Abaaoud was the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by Belgium -- where a court had in July sentenced him in absentia to 20 years in prison for recruiting jihadists for Syria.

But it was only three days after the Paris bloodbath that "intelligence services of a country outside Europe indicated they had knowledge of his presence in Greece", Cazeneuve said, without specifying which country.

Abaaoud was also checked by police at Cologne-Bonn airport on his way to Istanbul in early 2014, German officials said, but was allowed to go as they had no indication he should be stopped.

- Radical cousin -EU interior and justice ministers are to meet in Brussels on Friday where they will tighten checks on all travellers at the external borders of the 26-nation Schengen zone as an emergency measure.

At least 129 people were killed in the shootings and suicide bombings that targeted a concert hall, bars and restaurants and the Stade de France national stadium last Friday.

It was the second major attack in Paris in less than a year. In January, jihadist gunmen killed 17 people at Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, on the streets and in a Jewish supermarket.

Abaaoud was involved in four out of six attack plots foiled in France this year, Cazeneuve said. Police are also probing links to a thwarted assault on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris in August.

As the probe widened across Europe, Belgian police arrested nine people in Brussels, seven in raids linked to a suicide bomber who took part in the Paris attacks last Friday.

Italy was also hunting five suspects after an FBI tip-off about possible jihadist attacks on landmark sites.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said fingerprint analysis was used to identify Abaaoud's body, found riddled with bullets in the rubble of the shattered building in Saint-Denis following a seven-hour police siege.

Another body found after the ferocious shootout is thought to be that of Abaaoud's 26-year-old cousin Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who detonated an explosives vest.

Speaking to AFP before police raided a house northeast of Paris where Boulahcen had lived with her mother and siblings, her brother said she had become radicalised only around six months ago.

"She was unstable, she created her own bubble. She wasn't looking to study religion, I have never even seen her open a Koran," he told AFP.

"It's brainwashing," added her 58-year-old mother, with whom she had been living in the gritty Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois until a few weeks ago.

'IT'S CARNAGE'

Eight arrests were made in Wednesday's massive raid in Saint Denis, but another key suspect, Salah Abdeslam, remains unaccounted for.

Abdeslam is thought to be one of the only surviving members of the group of assailants behind the Paris attacks. His suicide-bomber brother Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up at a cafe without killing anyone.

Chilling CCTV footage has emerged in which a gunman can be seen pointing his weapon at a woman crouching under a table outside the café — but it jams, allowing her to flee.

A video has also emerged from the bloody scene outside La Bonne Biere restaurant just seconds after it came under fire, with bodies seen lying on the ground as people rushed to help the victims. "It's carnage", a voice can be heard saying off-camera.

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".

The measures include allowing police to carry weapons when they are off duty and use them in the event of an attack. French MPs also voted to let the government block websites and social media accounts promoting or inciting terrorist acts.

French President Francois Hollande also ordered French air strikes against IS jihadists be stepped up in Iraq as well as Syria.

FRANCE: French Officials Believe 20 Plus Plotters Were Involved In Paris Attacks

European authorities staged an international manhunt on Sunday for a 26-year-old “dangerous individual,” one of three brothers involved in the deadly attacks on Paris, even as an image took shape of a larger network of terrorists that could involve as many as 20 plotters.

At least eight assailants in three death squads are thought to have directly carried out Friday’s assault, which is being dubbed France’s 9/11. Six detonated their suicide belts. Police shot and killed one. French police on Sunday issued an urgent alert and released a photo of an eighth suspect: the 5-foot-7-inch Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national.

The manhunt came as France detained seven people for questioning and Belgian officials detained seven more in connection with the siege that killed at least 132 people. The international dragnet and investigation now stretch from the Aegean Sea to the teeming Paris suburbs. At the same time, France responded to an act of terrorism it blamed on the Islamic State with airstrikes on the group’s Syrian stronghold, the city of Raqqa.

Yet Europeans and their governments were confronting a chilling reality at home. A rogues’ gallery of homegrown terrorists with links to Islamist groups has become large enough – and is acting stealthily enough – to make tracking them increasingly difficult for the region’s intelligence agencies.

A senior official familiar with the investigation said authorities suspected that as many as 20 people in Europe had been involved in planning, supporting and executing the attack. Just as in January, when two brothers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, staged a bloody siege in Paris, some of the attackers this time were also related. Brahim Abdeslam, 31, blew himself up Friday night inside a busy cafe. His 26-year-old brother, Salah, who allegedly rented a car that was used in one of the attacks, is on the run. A third unnamed brother was apprehended in Belgium.

It became evident, in fact, that Brussels was a major base of operations for the Paris attacks, after French police seized a car rented in Belgium and then uncovered a fortuitous clue: a discarded parking ticket from the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, a district known as a breeding ground for jihadists.

At least two of the eight known attackers had spent time in Syria, according to two European intelligence officials, who like many interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. One of them, Bilal Hadfi, a 20-year-old French national, was known to have returned from the Middle East to Belgium. He then disappeared from the radar of the Belgian security services.

One senior European intelligence official offered a mea culpa: “That so many people, some of whom had been known to police, had been able to plot such a large attack, using suicide explosive belts, weapons, without the intelligence services knowing – that’s a major failure of the intelligence services.”

This secular city, consecrated to personal liberties, found itself plunged into a new normal of tension. Police found a car with Kalashnikovs inside in the eastern suburb of Montreuil. On Wednesday, President François Hollande will present a bill to the National Assembly calling for a three-month state of emergency – a move granting exceptional police powers to restrict freedom of movement and gatherings at public places.

On Sunday night, the sound of what may have been a firecracker, or a light fixture blowing a circuit breaker at a restaurant near the Place de la Republique, where a vigil was taking place, ignited an extraordinary panic. People stampeded out of restaurants, bars and stores across a two-mile-wide sector of the city as false warnings of gunshots erupted on Twitter. Some dived into news vans. Hotels turned off their lights as employees huddled behind chairs. One woman flung herself into the Canal St. Martin.

“Suddenly people were running and screaming everywhere, going in every direction,” said Omar Zahiri, a 50-year-old lawyer attending the vigil. “I said, ‘Stop running like a crazy person, calm down.’ But they didn’t. They kept running.”

An incomplete picture of the perpetrators began to emerge. A Syrian passport was found at the stadium where three suicide bombers blew themselves up; it may have belonged to one of them. A senior European security official said the name in the passport was Ahmad Almohammad. According to the passport, he was 25 and was born in Idlib, Syria.

Officials have not conclusively connected the document to any of the bombers. But Greek authorities, following through on a request from the French, traced the Syrian passport to a refugee who arrived on the Aegean island of Leros on Oct. 3 with 198 other people on a migrant boat. The possible link was enough to ignite fresh calls by some to end the huge flow of refugees pouring into Europe.

At a Group of 20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker urged world leaders not to treat asylum seekers as terrorists in the wake of the Paris attacks. The people who organized and carried out the attacks “are exactly those who the refugees are fleeing,” he told reporters, adding that “there is no need to revise the European Union’s entire refugee policy.”

Other assailants, however, appeared to fit an emerging pattern among Europe’s homegrown extremists – petty criminals who were radicalized and became far more religious than their parents.

A case in point is Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old French national who blew himself up after gunning down victims alongside two other suicide bombers at a Paris music hall. He had a criminal record, French officials said, and was picked up for eight minor offenses between 2004 and 2010, including driving without a license.

In 2010, however, Mostefai came on the radar screen of French intelligence because of his association with radical Islamists at a mosque in Lucé, near Chartres, a city southwest of Paris. The mosque is a modest, wooden-shuttered building surrounded by wrought-iron railings. Its leaders were bewildered to find themselves in the limelight Sunday. They called a news conference to deny any connection to extremism. The current administration, they said, took over in 2013 – after Mostefai had left the area – and they said no one recalled ever seeing him there.

Mostefai is thought to have traveled to Syria in the winter of 2013, a French police official familiar with the case said. “That is when we lost track of him,” the official said.

During his youth, Mostefai lived in a middle-class, predominantly Arab neighborhood in the Paris suburb of Courcouronne. Kamel Ousti, 53, a neighbor and family friend, said Mostefai grew up in a modest apartment on Rue Pont Amar, with three brothers; two sisters; a father, who was a deliveryman of Algerian descent; and a mother who was a Portuguese convert to Islam.

When Mostefai was 13, the family received an eviction notice because of his criminal tendencies. “Ismael was kind of a troublemaker, he used to steal things, like mobile phones,” Ousti said. Ousti recalled one traumatic event in the family’s history. During a trip to Algeria, in 2000, Ousti said they went to the beach, where Mostefai’s brother-in-law and two nephews drowned in the surf.

The family eventually moved to Chartres, where residents today recall his family as religious but not extremely so. Mostefai’s mother wore a headscarf, but his sisters did not.

Ousti last saw Mostefai four years ago. “He was the kind of kid who wouldn’t talk that much. If you ask me, the little lamb turned into a monster.”

Mostefai’s brother, who surrendered for questioning in a southeastern suburb of Paris, told the Agence France-Presse news service that he had broken off all ties with his brother years ago. The 34-year-old man, who was not identified, said Mostefai had moved back to Algeria with his young daughter. He said he was shocked to learn that his brother was involved in the attacks.

French SWAT teams searched the brother’s home and that of Mostefai’s father, outside Paris, for three hours Saturday night, according to RTL radio.

“What does this have to do with us?” the brother’s wife asked in tears. “We haven’t spoken to him in years. I hope we'll be left alone. We have a quiet little life, and this is starting to worry me.”