French police close in on terror cell
AWOMAN suicide bomber blew herself up and another militant died yesterday when police raided a flat in the Paris suburb of St Denis seeking suspects in connection with last week’s attacks in the French capital.
Officials said police had been hunting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamist militant accused of masterminding the November 13 carnage, but more than seven 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 flat, officials said.
“It is impossible to tell you who was arrested. We are in the process of verifying that. Everything will be done to determine who is who,” Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said at the end of the operation.
Molins 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.
A total of 129 people died in the co-ordinated bombings and shootings. Investigators believe the worst atrocity in France since World War II was set in motion from Syria, with Islamist cells in neighbouring Belgium organising the mayhem.
Two police sources say investigators believe the St Denis group had been planning an attack on the French capital’s La Defense business capital.
Local residents spoke of their fear and panic as the shooting started in St Denis just before 4.30am.
“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 of the flat 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 said without giving details.
Three police officers and a passer-by were injured in the assault. killed.
The Islamic State, which controls parts 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 large air strikes on Raqqa – the de-facto Islamic State capital in northern Syria.
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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 that 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 Belgian-based Frenchman who is believed to have played a central role in planning and executing the deadly mission.
Until yesterday morning, officials had said Abaaoud was in Syria.
He grew up in Brussels, but media said he moved to Syria in 2014 to fight with the Islamic State.
Since then he has travelled back to Europe at least once and was involved in a series of planned attacks in Belgium foiled by the police last January.
A man in St Denis told reporters that he had let the besieged flat to two people last week.
“Someone asked me a favour, I did them a favour. Someone asked me to put two people up for three days and I did them a favour – it’s normal. I don’t know where they came from, I don’t know anything,” the man told Reuters Television.
He was later arrested by police. – Reuters BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the decision to cancel a soccer match between Germany and The Netherlands on Tuesday evening owing to security concerns, just four days after Islamist attacks in Paris killed at least 129 people.
“I was just as sad as the millions of fans that the match was cancelled. But the security officials took a responsible decision,” Merkel said in a brief statement to reporters yesterday.
“These are difficult decisions, perhaps the most difficult given the conflicting priorities of freedom and security.
“But it was right to decide based on security.” – Reuters