Paris attacks: Saint-Denis suicide bomber was male, says police source

Updated

Investigators sorting through body parts from a flat raided by French police on Wednesday now believe Hasna Ait Boulahcen, the woman who died there, was not the one wearing a suicide belt, a source close to the investigation says.

Headlines flashed around the world this week that Ait Boulahcen had become Europe's first woman suicide bomber, after officials said they believed she had blown herself up at the scene of the raid in a northern Paris suburb.

Two other people died at the flat in Saint-Denis on the city's outskirts after Ait Boulahcen, believed to be the cousin of suspected Paris attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, took him there on Tuesday evening (Paris time).

One of the dead has been confirmed as Islamist militant Abaaoud. The other has yet to be identified.

Police had been hunting Abaaoud since the killing of 130 people in Paris last weekend which was claimed by Islamic State, and which they believe he orchestrated.

"The initial findings from the special police indicated that it [the suicide belt wearer] was her," said the source. "But the skull we found on the pavement was not hers."

The fighting at the flat was so intense that not only were the police unable initially to identify the bodies, it took more than a day for investigators to establish that there had been three people and not two.

Tapping of Ait Boulahcen's phone led police to Abaaoud

Police watched Abaaoud being led by a woman into an apartment the evening before both died there, a police source said on Saturday (AEDT).

After a tip-off from Morocco that Abaaoud, one of Islamic State's most high-profile European recruits, was in France, police homed in on Ait Boulahcen, who was already under surveillance and was known to have links to him.

Police had been tapping her phone as part of a drugs investigation and tracked her to Saint-Denis, the same suburb as the stadium where three suicide bombers blew themselves up during last week's attacks that killed 130 people.

They watched the 26-year-old woman take Abaaoud into the building on Tuesday evening. In the early hours of Wednesday, police launched an assault that lasted seven hours.

One of the police sources also said Abaaoud had been caught on camera at a suburban metro station, after the shootings at cafes and restaurants in central Paris but while a massacre in the Bataclan concert hall was still underway.

He was seen on closed-circuit TV at the Croix de Chavaux station in Montreuil, not far from where one of the cars used in the attacks was found, the source said.

Police continue response on a massive scale

In response to the Paris attacks, French police carried out raids across the country for a fifth day.

So far, police have searched 793 premises, held 90 people for questioning, put 164 under house arrest and recovered 174 weapons, including assault rifles and other guns, the Interior Ministry said.

Police searched a mosque in Brest in western France on Friday. Its imam, Rachid Abou Houdeyfa, who has condemned the Paris attacks, achieved notoriety this year for telling children they could be turned into pigs for listening to music.

In an unusual step, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), the main umbrella group for mosque associations, and several of its member groups, urged their imams to denounce the attacks in Friday sermons and distributed suggested texts.

A bill to extend a state of emergency imposed a day after the Paris attacks into February and which would give the police more powers, was expected to receive a final approval from the upper house of parliament.

Since the attacks, requests for information about joining the French army have surged. Colonel Herve Chene, head of air force recruitment, said the numbers of people visiting his unit's hiring centres had tripled since last Friday.

Abaaoud disowned by family

Abaaoud was a petty criminal who went to fight in Syria in 2013 and European governments thought he was still there. He is believed to have recruited young men to fight for Islamic State from immigrant families in his native Brussels district of Molenbeek and elsewhere in Belgium and France.

Abaaoud appeared in Islamic State's slick online English-language magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of crossing European borders to stage attacks. He claimed to have escaped a continent-wide manhunt after a police raid in Belgium in January in which two militants died.

Islamic State, which controls parts of Iraq and Syria, has attracted thousands of young Europeans and Abaaoud was seen as a leading figure in luring others, particularly from Belgium.

His own family has disowned him, accusing him of abducting his 13-year-old brother, who was later promoted on the internet as Islamic State's youngest foreign fighter in Syria.

Moroccan authorities, who have detained scores of Islamic State militants in recent months, also arrested Abaaoud's brother Yassine last month after he arrived in Agadir, a Moroccan security source said.

Two suicide bombers travelled via Greece: prosecutor

In Paris, prosecutors said they now believe two of the bombers who blew themselves up at the football stadium last Friday travelled to Greece together.

One of the suicide bombers at the Stade de France had been identified from a Syrian passport found near his body as Ahmad al-Mohammad, though it was not clear whether the passport was genuine or had been stolen.

Reports on Tuesday said the passport holder, who arrived in Greece alongside 198 refugees by boat from Turkey on October 3, may have been travelling with an accomplice.

In a statement on Friday, the Paris prosecutor said the suicide bomber who detonated his explosive vest at Gate H of the stadium had his fingerprints taken in Greece on October 3, at the same time as the bomber who blew himself up at Gate D.

A counter-intelligence source in Macedonia said a man holding Ahmad al-Mohammad's passport was still travelling with a companion two days after reaching the Greek port of Piraeus.

They registered together at a refugee camp in the backyard of an old tobacco plant in the Serbian town of Presevo, though Serbian officials have not mentioned an accomplice.

While quickly tracking Abaaoud down will be seen as a major success for French authorities, his presence in Paris will focus more attention on the difficulty European security services have in monitoring the continent's borders.

Meanwhile, Belgium charged a suspect with terrorism offences on Friday, a day after police detained the person during a series of raids.

Belgian federal prosecutors said an investigating judge had charged the person, who was not identified, with participating in terrorist attacks and in the activities of a terrorist organisation. They gave no further details.

On Saturday the Belgium government raised its capital, Brussels, to the highest alert level over a "serious and imminent threat".

EU interior and justice ministers in Brussels on Friday pledged solidarity with France in the wake of the attacks and agreed a series of new measures on surveillance, border checks and gun control.

The recent attack in Mali were another a slap in the face for France, which has stationed 3,500 troops in northern Mali that are meant to be restoring stability and security after a Tuareg rebellion was hijacked by Al Qaeda-linked fighters in 2012.

"It is the same terrorists under different names who are fighting us and who we are fighting. It will be a long war," French prime minister Manuel Valls told reporters.

Reuters

Topics: terrorism, unrest-conflict-and-war, france

First posted