Battle rages in Paris suburb
Seven held as army, police hit militants in early morning raid
Awoman suicide bomber blew herself up and another militant died yesterday when police raided an apartment in the Paris suburb of St Denis seeking suspects in last week’s attacks in the French capital.
Three sources told reporters the raid stopped a jihadist cell that had been planning an attack on Paris’s business district, La Defense, after coordinated bombings and shootings killed 129 across the city.
Officials said police had been hunting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamist militant accused of masterminding the November 13 carnage, but more than nine hours after the launch of the pre-dawn raid it was still unclear if they had found him.
Seven people were arrested in the operation, which started with a barrage of gunfire, including three people who were pulled from the apartment, officials said.
“It is impossible to tell you who was arrested. We are in the process of verifying that,” Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said at the end of the operation.
He said the assault was ordered after phone taps and surveillance operations led police to believe that Abaaoud might have been in St Denis, near to the soccer stadium which was site of one of the attacks that hit Paris last week.
Investigators believe the attacks – the worst atrocity in France since World War 2 – was set in motion from Syria, with Islamist cells in neighbouring Belgium organising the mayhem.
Local residents spoke of their fear and panic as the shooting started in St Denis just before 4.30am local time.
“We could see bullets flying and laser beams out of the window. There were explosions. You could feel the whole building shake,” said Sabrine, a downstairs neighbour from the apartment that was raided.
She told Europe 1 radio that she heard the people above her talking to each other, running around and reloading their guns.
Another local, Sanoko Abdulai, said that as the operation gathered pace, a young woman detonated an explosion.
“She had a bomb, that’s for sure. The police didn’t kill her, she blew herself up,” he told reporters, without giving details. Three police officers and a passerby were injured in the assault. A police dog was also killed.
Islamic State, which controls swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, saying they were in retaliation for French air raids against their positions over the past year.
France has called for a global coalition to defeat the radicals and has launched three air strikes on Raqqa – the de-facto Islamic State capital in northern Syria.
Russia has also targeted the city in retribution for the downing of a Russian airliner last month that killed 224 people.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said yesterday the bombardments had killed at least 33 Islamic State militants over the past three days.
Citing activists, the Observatory said Islamic State members and dozens of families of senior members had started fleeing Raqqa to relocate to Mosul in neighbouring Iraq.
French prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants from Friday – four Frenchmen and a man who was fingerprinted in Greece last month after arriving in the country via Turkey with a boatload of refugees fleeing the Syria war.
Police believe two men directly involved in the assault subsequently escaped, including Salah Abdeslam, 26, a Belgianbased Frenchman who is accused of having played a central role in both planning and executing the deadly mission.
French authorities said yesterday they had identified all the November 13 victims. They came from 17 different countries, many of them young people out enjoying themselves at bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a soccer stadium.
A man in St Denis told reporters that he had rented out the besieged apartment to two people last week. He was later arrested by police. Paris and Moscow are not coordinating their air strikes in Syria, but French President Francois Hollande will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on November 26 to discuss how their countries’ militaries might work together.
Hollande is due to meet US President Barack Obama in Washington two days before that to push for a concerted drive against Islamic State.
Russia is allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the West says he must go if there is to be a political solution to Syria’s prolonged civil war.
Hollande confirmed that a French aircraft carrier group would set sail later in the day and head to the eastern Mediterranean to intensify the number of strikes on militant targets in Syria.
Russia has said its navy will cooperate with this mission. — Reuters