EU nations vow quick action to tighten up their borders
Countries agree tougher controls needed to keep out violent extremists
European Union nations promised Friday to quickly tighten the bloc’s vast external border to prevent more violent extremists from coming in, and French authorities reported that a third body had been found in a Paris apartment raided by police.
Meanwhile, video footage emerged of the “ringleader” behind the Paris attacks jumping a ticket barrier in the city’s Metro system as fellow jihadists were committing mass murder across the French capital.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud dodged a fare at the Croix de Chavaux station in the suburb of Montreuil, 200 yards from where one of the cars used in the attacks was found.
The footage showed him at the station at 10:14 p.m., when the attack on the Bataclan concert hall was still under way, suggesting he played a more active role in the atrocities than previously thought. A Seat car was found abandoned near the same Metro station at the weekend with three Kalashnikov assault rifles inside.
Officials will now trace Abaaoud’s movements on Line 9 and seek further evidence of fellow conspirators. He was later killed when police raided an apartment in the Saint Denis district, where he was hiding with Hasna Aitboulahcen, his cousin, and other suspects.
Abaaoud, 28, was known to police as a petty criminal who went to fight in Syria in 2013. He is believed to have recruited young men from immigrant families in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, where he grew up, and elsewhere in Belgium and France.
One week after the co-ordinated gun and bomb assault that killed 130 people in Paris, investigators said they had determined through fingerprint checks that two of the seven attackers who died in the bloodshed had entered Europe through Greece on Oct. 3.
Previously they had said only one attacker had been registered in Greece, a main entry point for migrants seeking asylum in Europe. That man carried a passport naming him as Ahmad Al-Mohammad but it’s unclear whether it was authentic.
France’s Senate voted to extend for three months a state of emergency, which expands police powers to carry out arrests and searches and allows authorities to forbid the movement of persons and vehicles at specific times and places. France’s lower chamber has already approved the measure.
In Brussels, France and Belgium urged their European Union partners to tighten gun laws, toughen border security and choke off funds to extremist groups.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said “terrorists are crossing the borders of the European Union,” underlining the urgent need for the 28-nation bloc to implement a long-delayed system for collecting and exchanging airline passenger information. He said that data is vital “for tracing the return of foreign fighters” from Syria and Iraq.
The EU exchanges such information with the U.S., Australia and Canada, but has proved incapable of agreeing on a system for sharing data between its members.
France has called for inter-European flights to be included in the data sweep and wants the information it retains — names, credit card details, itinerary and other personal data — to be kept for one year instead of one month.
How and when Abaaoud entered France before his death remained unclear. He had bragged in the ISIL’s English-language magazine that he was able to move in and out of Europe undetected. As it turned out, not only was Abaaoud in Europe, but he was just a 15-minute walk from the French national stadium where three suicide bombers blew themselves up.
French President François Hollande’s office said he will lead a national ceremony on Nov. 27 honouring the victims.
Of the more than 350 people wounded in the attacks, scores are in critical condition. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said one more person has died, raising the death toll to 130, not including the attackers.