French hunt second fugitive in terror attacks.
Raid aims to capture fugitives wanted in terrorist attacks
PARIS — The police stormed the northern Paris suburb of St.Denis early Wednesday morning in a raid evidently aimed at capturing at least two fugitives wanted for participating in the terrorist attacks that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday.
Heavy gunfire erupted around 4 a.m., the suburb’s mayor, Didier Paillard, and residents told a French television channel, iTélé, and lasted at least 20 minutes. Helicopters flew overhead, and the authorities warned people to stay indoors.
The raid appeared to focus on an apartment near Place Jean Jaurès, a main square in St.Denis not far from the Stade de France, where three of the seven attackers who died on Friday blew themselves up. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed the raid but could not provide immediate details.
The assault in St.-Denis appeared to focus on a fugitive, whose existence was confirmed by intelligence officials on Tuesday night.
The police in France and Belgium continued their pursuit of another fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, 26, a Frenchman who is believed to have escaped to Brussels, while two French officials — who were briefed on the investigation but not authorized to discuss operational details — said Tuesday evening that the authorities were looking for an accomplice who was directly involved in the attacks.
Airstrikes continue
Seven attackers died in the assaults on Friday night, but it now appears that at least nine took part or played some role.
Some of the attackers, who killed 129 people in a closely coordinated series of assaults that lasted three hours, rented a house in the northeast Paris suburb of Bobigny last week, telling the landlady that they were businessmen from Belgium, and a hotel suite in the southeast Paris suburb of Alfortville, officials said.
The person suspected of organizing the attacks — a Belgian militant named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is 27 or 28 — is believed to be in Syria with fellow Islamic State militants, French and U.S. intelligence officials have concluded.
Early Tuesday, 10 French fighter jets, taking off from bases in Jordan and the Persian Gulf, dropped 16 bombs on what the French Defense Ministry described as an Islamic State command center and training center in the group’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa, Syria. Hours later, Russia carried out an attack on Raqqa, with cruise missiles and long-range bombers, after acknowledging that a terrorist bomb brought down a Russian jetliner over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt — a hotbed of Islamic State activity — on Oct. 31.
France, through its defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, took the extraordinary step Tuesday of invoking a European Union treaty that obliges members to help any member that is “the victim of armed aggression on its territory.”
President François Hollande took steps to shore up global support for what he has called a war to annihilate the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He met with Secretary of State John Kerry, who expressed sympathy but reiterated the Obama administration’s view that the group will not be destroyed until Syria’s embattled president, Bashar Assad, leaves power.
Hollande to visit Obama
Hollande will visit Washington and Moscow next week to meet with President Barack Obama and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament that the Paris attacks had strengthened the case for intervening against the Islamic State in Syria, a move that Parliament rejected in 2013.
On France’s third and final day of national mourning, crowds gathered to light candles and lay flowers at the Place de la République and at makeshift memorials at the sites of the attacks. In the southwestern city of Toulouse, thousands gathered in the central square, waving French flags and singing “La Marseillaise,” France’s national anthem.
“The terrorists want to erase everything: culture, youth, life, and also history and memory,” Hollande said in a speech at a UNESCO conference in Paris.
“You do not fight against terrorism by hiding, by putting your life on hold, by suspending economic, social and cultural life, by banning concerts, theater, sports competitions,” he said. “We will not yield to terrorism by suspending our way of life.”
Many Parisians and visitors followed his advice, flocking to restaurants, cafes and museums in an effort to carry on with normal life. But the country continued to reel from the attacks, the worst violence on French soil in decades.
Officials said that the bodies of 117 of the 129 people killed had been positively identified; 221 of the 352 people injured remained in hospitals, 57 of them in intensive care.
The country remained under a state of emergency, as developments in the investigation emerged in a steady trickle.
In the morning, the authorities seized a black Renault Clio with Belgian license plates in the 18th Arrondissement on the northern edge of Paris, next to the suburb of St.-Denis, where three suicide bombers detonated their explosives during a soccer game at the Stade de France. Authorities are looking into the possibility that the vehicle might have been intended for yet another attack.