Paris attacks:
European Union nations promise to tighten the bloc’s vast external border to prevent more extremists from coming in.
BRUSSELS — 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.
One week after the coordinated 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.
Meanwhile, 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.
Despite deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish market in Paris in January, talks among European nations and with the EU legislature have gone at a snail’s pace on vital security issues while violent extremism has thrived.
“We must move swiftly and with force,” Cazeneuve said after the meeting. “Europe owes it to all victims of terrorism and those who are close to them.”
On Friday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said three bodies had been found in the apartment, including Belgian- born Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 28, the architect of the attacks in Paris, and his cousin Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26. No information was released about the identity of the third body.