French authorities hunt suspect in Paris attacks
PARIS— The Paris terrorist attacks were carried out with the help of three French brothers living in Belgium, authorities said Sunday, as they asked for the public’s assistance in finding one of them.
French officials said they were seeking Salah Abdeslam, 26, and described him as dangerous. The police warned the public: “Do not intervene on your own, under any circumstances.” Belgian officials said his brother Brahim had died in the three-hour massacre and another brother, Mohamed, had been detained Saturday in Brussels.
The co-ordinated attacks Friday night, which killed at least 129 people and are believed to be the work of Islamic State, increasingly appear to have involved extensive planning by a network of men with sophisticated weapons who plotted the attack from outside the country.
Senior Iraqi intelligence officials had warned coalition countries of imminent assaults by ISIS just one day before the attacks, The Associated Press reported.
Iraqi intelligence sent a dispatch saying the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had ordered an attack on coalition countries fighting against them in Iraq and Syria, as well as on Iran and Russia, “through bombings or assassinations or hostage-taking in the coming days.”
The dispatch said the Iraqis had no specific details on when or where the attack would take place, and a senior French security official said French intelligence gets this kind of communication “all the time” and “every day.”
However, six senior Iraqi officials corroborated the information in the dispatch, a copy of which was obtained by the AP.
Four of the Iraqi intelligence officials said they also warned France specifically of a potential attack. Two officials said France was warned beforehand of details that French authorities have yet to make public.
Among them: that the Paris attacks appear to have been planned in Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, where the attackers were trained specifically for this operation and with the intention of sending them to France, which launched an attack on Raqqa Sunday night.
The officials also said a sleeper cell in France then met with the attackers after their training and helped them to execute the plan. There were 24 people involved in the operation, they said: 19 attackers and five others in charge of logistics and planning. None of these details have been corroborated by officials of France or other western intelligence agencies.
French officials said U.S. security services alerted them in September to vague but credible information that French jihadists in Syria were planning some type of attack. That tip, they said, contributed to France’s decision to launch what it hoped might be pre-emptive airstrikes on Oct. 8 against Raqqa.
The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, after meeting in Paris with his Belgian counterpart, Jan Jambon, said the attackers had “prepared abroad and had mobilized a team of participants located on Belgian territory, and who may have benefited — the investigation will tell us more — from complicity in France.”
The immediate challenge for investigators, who have arrested seven people, is identifying all the attackers and piecing together how they carried out the plot. French officials say that six attackers died by blowing themselves up and a seventh died in a shootout with police.
French officials initially said eight attackers died Friday.
On Sunday, intelligence officials said they were looking for an eighth man believed to have been involved in the attacks and, hours later, the police released Abdeslam’s name and photo.
As many as three of the seven suicide bombers were French citizens, as was at least one of the men arrested in the Molenbeek St-Jean neighbourhood of Brussels, which authorities consider to be a focal point for extremists and fighters going to Syria from Belgium.
Jambon told the Associated Press suspects arrested in Molenbeek had been stopped previously in Cambrai, France, “in a regular roadside check” but that police had had no suspicion about them at the time and they were let go quickly.
One, identified by the print on a recovered finger, was 29-year-old Frenchman Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, who had a record of petty crime and had been flagged in 2010 for ties to Islamic radicalism, the Paris prosecutor said. A judicial official and lawmaker Jean-Pierre Gorges confirmed his identity.
Mostefaï was the middle of five children born to an Algerian father and a Portuguese mother, and he once worked at a bakery, according to a former neighbour at the housing development just outside Chartres where the family used to live.
“It was a normal family, just like everybody else,” said the neighbour, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He played with my children. He never spoke about religion. He was normal. He had a joie de vivre. He laughed a lot.”
For reasons that are unclear, Mostefaï changed. “It was in 2010, that’s when he started to become radicalized,” the neighbour said. “We don’t understand what happened.”
As the authorities continued to examine Mostefaï’s motivations and background, other clues emerged from official accounts in France and Belgium.
A judicial official said police have also identified two other of the suicide bombers, both French nationals who’d been living in Belgium: 20year-old Bilal Hadfi, who detonated himself outside the Stade de France; and 31-year-old Brahim Abdeslam, the brother of fugitive Salah Abdeslam, who blew himself up on the Boulevard Voltaire.
The French president had already announced new border controls to prevent the perpetrators from escaping. Hours had passed since investigators identified Abdeslam as the renter of a Volkswagen Polo that carried the attackers to the Paris theatre where almost three-quarters of the 129 victims were killed.
It’s not clear why the local French police, known as gendarmes, didn’t take Abdeslam into custody. They checked his identification, but it’s not known whether they had been informed of his apparent connection to the attacks.
One attacker, whose nationality is not yet known, evidently posed as a Syrian migrant. The Serbian newspaper Blic published a photograph of a passport page that identified its holder as Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, a native of Idlib, Syria. He passed through the Greek island of Leros on Oct. 3 and the Serbian border town of Presevo on Oct. 7, officials in those countries said. It was not clear whether the passport was authentic; the civil war that has sent millions of Syrians fleeing and fuelled the rise of ISIS has also created a large black market for forged Syrian passports.
Struggling to keep his country calm and united after an exceptionally violent year, President François Hollande met Sunday with opposition leaders — conservative rival and former president Nicolas Sarkozy as well as increasingly popular far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who has used the attacks on Paris to advance her anti-immigrant agenda. The Associated Press and The New York Times