A woman suicide bomber blew herself up and another militant died yesterday when police raided an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis seeking suspects in last week’s attacks in the French capital.
Three sources said 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 on Friday last week.
Officials said police had been hunting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Muslim militant accused of masterminding Friday’s carnage, but more than nine hours after the launch of the pre-dawn raid it was still unclear if they had found him.
Photo: EPA
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. 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 Saint Denis, near the soccer stadium which was the site of one of the attacks on Friday.
Photo: AFP
Investigators believe the attacks were set in motion from Syria, with militant cells in Belgium organizing the mayhem.
Local residents spoke of their fear and panic as the shooting started in Saint 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 neighbor 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 said.
Three police officers and a passerby were injured in the assault. A police dog was also killed.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, saying they were in retaliation for French air raids against their positions in Syria and Iraq over the past year.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group yesterday said that airstrikes by France and Russia in Syria have 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 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 via Turkey with a boatload of refugees fleeing the Syria war.
Authorities also said that they had identified all of the victims from Friday’s attacks.
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