The body of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the deadly suicide bombings and shootings that left 129 people dead in Paris last week, has been formally identified.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said in brief statement that Abaaoud, who was thought to have been in in Syria since 2014 but is known to have returned to Europe on at least one occasion since, was one of two people killed in a ferocious firefight with police at a terrorist hideout north of Paris on Wednesday.
The mutilated body of the 27-year-old Belgian extremist, linked with several terrorist attacks in Europe, was found in the rubble of the badly damaged apartment in rue du Corbillon, St-Denis, the prosecutor’s office said, and identified from skin samples.
The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said Abaaoud played a “decisive role” in the Paris attacks and had been involved in four of six terror plots that French intelligence services had foiled this year.
The jihadi was the subject of both a European and an international arrest warrant, Cazeneuve said, yet no EU intelligence service had alerted France that he was on European soil, with information – from a non-European agency – that Abaaoud may recently have been in Greece only reaching France on 16 November, three days after the attacks.
Europe now had “to move fast and firmly,” Cazeneuve demanded, calling on EU interior ministers meeting on Friday to agree on a Europe-wide passenger information register, improved controls along Europe’s external borders, and better coordination against arms-trafficking.
At least two people – a woman, identified by police as Abaaoud’s cousin, Hasna Aitboulahcen, who apparently blew herself up by detonating an explosive vest, and a man hit by multiple gunshots and a grenade – were known to have died in the seven-hour assault on the rundown apartment block.
But identification took longer than expected because of the condition of the bodies and the dangerous state of the partly-collapsed building, whose entire third floor caved in during the seven-hour siege, police said.
A brief exchange between Aitboulahcen, a 26-year-old French-Moroccan national, and a Swat team was recorded during the standoff, with a police officer asking: “Where is your boyfriend?” Seconds before a huge explosion was heard, she replied: “He’s not my boyfriend!” Parts of her spine reportedly landed on a police car.
Authorities had said neither Abaaoud nor Salah Abdeslam, another fugitive who is still urgently sought in connection with Friday’s carnage, were among eight people who were also arrested at the scene.
Abaaoud, who studied at one of Belgium’s top secondary schools, was jailed in 2010 for armed robbery and reportedly joined Isis in 2013. He has since boasted of his ability to slip at will between Syria and Europe.
He was in close contact with Mehdi Nemmouche, a French—Algerian jihadi who shot and killed four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014.
Abaaoud is also suspected of helping organise a terror cell in Verviers, Belgium, that was broken up in a shootout with police in January, and of involvement in an August attack on a Thalys train foiled by a Briton and three US tourists.
A notorious 2014 Isis propaganda video shows him dragging the mutilated bodies of several of the terror group’s opponents behind a pickup truck.
Molins has said the bloody attacks on Paris shops, restaurants, a concert hall and the Stade de France – barely two kilometres from the scene of Wednesday’s shootout – were carried out by a Belgium-based cell in close contact with Islamic State in Syria. The terror group was quick to claim responsibility, saying the killings were in retaliation for French airstrikes on Isis positions in Syria.
As the Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, announced a package of additional anti-terror measures on Thursday and pledged €400m in extra funding to combat extremism, police raided six addresses in the Brussels region linked to Bilal Hadfi, one of three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France.
A source at the prosecutor’s office told local media the raids focused on people linked to Hadfi, a 20-year-old French national who was living in Belgium and who – like all the suicide bombers identified so far – had spent time in Syria. One arrest was also made in the Brussels suburb of Laeken in connection with the Paris attacks.
Six days into a national state of emergency declared after the attacks, which left 129 people dead and more than 350 injured, the national assembly – the lower house of the French parliament – voted to extend the emergency regime to February. The senate is expected to debate and approve the extension on Friday, after which it can go into effect.
Further, controversial security measures are also being discussed, including placing under house arrest anyone considered a public threat; barring suspects from communicating with each other; and allowing police to carry out searches at any time without the prior approval of a judge.
Police fired more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition during Wednesday’s raid, which was launched after a tip-off on Monday followed by extensive phone taps and surveillance led them to suspect Abaaoud.
The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told French radio on Thursday that if Abaaoud had indeed managed to return to France from Syria, it showed there were faults in the entire European system of checks.
Molins said on Wednesday he was confident “a new team of terrorists was neutralised. All the indications are that given their arms, their organisational structure and their determination, this commando could have struck.”
In a further indication that Isis supporters are active in France, a Jewish teacher was stabbed in Marseille by three people, one wearing an Isis T-shirt and another carrying a picture on his mobile telephone of Mohamed Merah, a French extremist who killed seven people in southern France in 2012. The teacher’s injuries are not life-threatening.
Alarm has increased around the world since the Paris attacks, the deadliest in France since the second world war. Police in New York said on Wednesday night they were aware of a newly released Isis video suggesting the city was a potential target.
The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, appeared with police commissioner Bill Bratton in Times Square at 11pm to say there was “no specific or credible threat” to the city,dismissing the video as an “obvious attempt to intimidate the people of New York”.
The French president, François Hollande, wants a global coalition to “destroy” the jihadis. French jets have pounded targets in Raqqa, the de facto Islamic State capital in northern Syria, three times since the weekend.
Russian warplanes have also bombarded the city in retaliation for the deaths of 224 people last month when a Russian airliner was bombed.
Hollande is due to meet the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on 26 November, two days after discuss military cooperation in the fight against Isis with the US president, Barack Obama.
A French diplomat told the Guardian that Paris wanted to see more urgency in tackling the war in Syria and the resulting refugee crisis in Europe. “The message that we want to send to the Americans is simply that the crisis is destabilising Europe,” the diplomat said. “The problem is that the attacks in Paris and the refugee crisis show that we don’t have time. There is an emergency.”
Prosecutors have identified five of the seven attackers who died in the Paris attacks: four Frenchmen and a foreigner who was fingerprinted in Greece last month and later claimed asylum in Serbia. He was carrying aSyrian passport, possibly fake, in the name of Ahmad Almohammad.
Police are still hunting one of the supposed gunmen, 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, whose brother Brahim blew himself up in the attacks, and another unidentified man they believe was directly involved.
Two suspected accomplices identified as Mohammed Amri, 27, and Hamza Attou, 21, who allegedly drove Salah Abdeslam back from Paris to the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, a longstanding hotbed of Islamic extremism, after the attacks, are being questioned by police in Belgium.
French police have made 60 arrests and seized 75 weapons after more than 400 raids across the country.
Ps: He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. #PrayForTheWorld
