‘IT WAS HORRIBLE. JUST LIKE A WAR ZONE’
Nearly 5,000 bullets fired during Paris raid on terror cell that leaves 2 dead
PARIS When Tagara Traoré, a former revolutionary soldier in his native Burkina Faso, was jolted awake by a boom early Wednesday, his “military reflex” kicked in.
“You get up quickly and either hide or try to get out,” he said.
In socked feet and wearing the sweatpants he was sleeping in, he grabbed his key and ran out the door of his fourth-storey apartment, only to find a battalion of police rushing up the stairs, headlamps glaring.
“I started sensing tear gas that was coming up the stairwell. I thought the building was on fire,” he said. “The police told me, ‘Go down, down, down!’ There were so many they had to move aside to let me out.”
It was 4:20 a.m., and he had been caught in the middle of a massive anti-terror operation that quickly became a protracted gun battle between police and terror suspects.
A woman in the targeted apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, identified by French media as a native of nearby Clichy, was one of the dead. Initial reports said she killed herself by detonating an explosive vest, but the French prosecutor’s office later said the “point needs to be verified by an analysis of the body and human remains.”
At least one other suspect in the apartment was killed and eight people were taken into custody.
Five police officers suffered minor injuries, and a police dog — Diesel — was killed by the terrorists, according to the national police.
Paris prosecutor François Molin said the targeted apartment had a fortified door that withstood police attempts to break in and gave the terrorists time to return fire.
“Sustained, almost uninterrupted, gunfire followed for nearly an hour,” Molin told an evening news conference. “On the police side, nearly 5,000 bullets were fired.”
Molin said authorities received a tip Monday that ISIL combatant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen believed to have planned the terror attacks that killed 129 people in Paris last Friday, was in France. Their verifications of phone and bank records led them to the shabby apartment building on Rue du Corbillon in Saint-Denis.
Molin specified that neither Abaaoud nor Salah Abdelsalam, suspected of taking part in the attacks on Paris restaurants, was among those arrested. But some media reports said Abaaoud was dead.
The prosecutor said the state of the two dead — one was “riddled with impacts” — had not allowed identification of the bodies.
The woman was identified in some media reports as Hasna Aitboulahcen, a cousin of Abaaoud.
The gun battle and explosion caused the building’s third storey to collapse, meaning another body could be among the debris.
Molin said that judging from their weapons, their organization and their determination, the “commando unit” targeted Wednesday was ready to carry out another terrorist strike.
Traoré said the police led him to shelter in a nearby hotel, but they scattered as soon as the intense gunfire broke out. “There was nobody left to protect me. I ran to my sister’s,” he said.
He believes police were targeting the residents in the apartment directly below him, which a man had broken into, taken over and recently rented to strangers.
Last week, Traoré began noticing an unfamiliar young man who was always using his phone in the building ’s courtyard when he came home at night. He had a hood covering his head and would avoid eye contact.
“I wondered, ‘Why is he always here? What’s he doing?’ But I’m not the police. I minded my own business,” he said.
Saint-Denis, home to a multiethnic, heavily Muslim population, is notorious as a den of drug dealing and petty crime, said one police officer standing guard Wednesday. When Traoré saw the police, his initial thought was that they had come for drug dealers.
Residents interviewed Wednesday said they were disgusted that the terrorists claimed to be acting in the name of Islam.
Boudouma Nabi, who described himself as a very devout Muslim, said the people killed Wednesday “are going into flames. They are going to hell.”
Alphonse Bangoura, 40, said French authorities needed to pay more attention to what went on in mosques, because that was where indoctrination leading to jihadism started. He said he laughed when an imam instructed it was wrong to drink Coke because it was the drink of Americans, but he worried more dangerous teachings were affecting young minds.
“They were too tolerant with these people,” he said of the radicals. “We are all Muslims, but I love life. Life is beautiful, no?”
PARIS The mystery man arrived in Europe on a boat from Turkey that washed up on the azure shores of Greece on Oct. 3. He disembarked with 197 desperate migrants on the isle of Leros, where harried police processed the man whose Syrian passport said he was Ahmad Al Mohammad, a 25-year-old from Idlib.
He then followed the same trail into Western Europe trodden by hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers escaping war and conflict in the Middle East, passing through Athens, Macedonia and Serbia, according to Greek and Serbian officials.
Then the man disappeared — until Friday, when he reappeared, this time in the form of the disfigured body of a suicide bomber in Paris, outside the Stade de France.
The fingerprints on the body, French and Greek officials say, matched those of the man who arrived in Leros on Oct. 3. That Syrian passport, French authorities confirmed Tuesday, was a fake.
“It is obvious now,” said Bernard Squarcini, the former chief of French intelligence. “Among the migrants, there are some terrorists.”
The case of the mystery bomber has ignited a political culture war across both sides of the Atlantic — one that revolves around whether it is migration or fear of migration that poses the greater peril.
Some have seized on the case as evidence that migrants and militants can be indistinguishable. But others worry that needy migrants will become the victims of a new wave of security paranoia.
In the case of the mystery man, the debate is complicated by the falsified passport, which means that no one knows his true name or nationality, or whether he was truly a migrant. His name was clearly not Ahmad Al Mohammad, and refugee advocates say the man may not have been Syrian.
There is no question that, on rare occasions, militants are slipping through border controls with migrants. Moroccan national Abdelmajid Touil, suspected of supplying weapons used in a March terrorist attack in Tunis that killed more than 20 tourists, had travelled to Italy a month earlier on a migrant boat from Libya. In May, he was arrested near Milan.
Now French officials are alarmed by the prospect that several of the assailants involved in Friday’s attacks may have tapped the migrant routes. “We are looking very closely at their travels,” said a French official involved in the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Concern is particularly focused on overburdened European entry points, nowhere more than in bankrupt Greece. Many of the asylum seekers flooding Greece are arriving without passports. Theoretically, interpreters are supposed to assess their claims by asking certain questions — What is the capital of Syria? — and assessing their accents.
But many “fake” refugees are unquestionably getting through. In September, officials in Germany said almost a third of asylum seekers there claiming to be Syrian were not actually from Syria. Fake Syrian passports are considered hot commodities on the black market across the narrow straits in Turkey, where a cottage industry has arisen of Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians and Egyptians seeking to pose as Syrians. The reason: Syrians have an exceptionally high acceptance rate as refugees in countries such as Germany, which offers generous benefits and housing to those genuinely fleeing war and persecution.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front party, has called for an immediate halt to the influx of migrants into France, saying that “our fears and our warnings about the possible presence of jihadists among the migrants who join our country have unfortunately been realized.’’
In the United States, more than two dozen Republican governors have said they plan to try to block Syrian refugees from resettling in their states.
French officials have issued a police bulletin with the mystery bomber’s image, appealing to the public for details on his identity. The few details that have emerged about his journey have raised red flags about the mechanisms now in place.
After landing in Greece on Oct. 3, the man claiming to be a Syrian named Ahmad Al Mohammad travelled to Athens, then followed the flow of refugees north, through Macedonia and Serbia, where he applied, along with hundreds of others, for a transit visa in the Serbian town of Presevo on Oct. 15.
The European agency meant to help guard the continent’s borders says it is dramatically overburdened and underfunded, despite pledges of boosted funds from the European Union. The agency, Frontex, said it was in urgent need of additional officers to fingerprint and screen migrants. At the beginning of October, Frontex requested 775 more border guards but received only 320.