At least two die in police raid on group planning new Paris attack

SAINT DENIS, France — A woman suicide bomber blew herself up in a police raid that sources said had foiled a militant plan to hit Paris' business district, days after attacks that killed 129 across the French capital.

Police stormed an apartment in the Paris suburb of St Denis in a hunt for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian militant accused of masterminding the bombings and shootings, but more than 15 hours later it was still unclear if they had found him.

Heavily armed officers entered the building before dawn, triggering a massive firefight and multiple explosions. Eight people were arrested and forensic scientists were working to confirm if two or three militants died in the violence.

"A new team of terrorists has been neutralised," Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters, saying police had fired 5,000 rounds of munitions into the apartment, which was left shredded by the assault, its windows blown out and the facade riddled with bullet impacts.

"This commando could have become operational," Molins said.

A source close to the investigation said the dead woman might have been Abaaoud's cousin, while The Washington Post quoted senior intelligence officials as saying Abaaoud himself had died in the shootout.

Molins said none of the bodies had been identified, adding only that Abaaoud was not amongst those detained.

Police were led to the apartment following a tip off that the 28-year-old Belgian, previously thought to have orchestrated the November 13 attacks from Syria, was actually in France.

Investigators believe the attacks — the worst atrocity in France since World War II — were set in motion in Syria, with militant cells in neighbouring Belgium organising the mayhem.

Local residents spoke of their fear and panic as the shooting started in St Denis just before 4.30am (0330 GMT).

"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 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 told Reuters, without giving details. Five police officers and a passerby were injured in the assault. A police dog was also killed.

Fleeing Raqqa

Daesh, which controls swathes 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 air strikes on Raqqa — the de-facto Daesh capital in northern Syria — since the weekend. Russia has also targeted the city in retribution for the downing of a Russian airliner last month that killed 224.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Wednesday the bombardments have killed at least 33 Daesh militants over the past three days.

Citing activists, the Observatory said Daesh 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 accused of having played a central role in both planning and executing the deadly mission.

French authorities said on Wednesday they had identified all the November 13 victims. They came from 17 different countries, many of them young people out enjoying themselves at bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a football stadium.

Empowered by a state of emergency introduced in France last Friday, police here have made hundreds of sweeps across the country over the past three days, arresting 60 suspects, putting 118 under house arrest and seizing 75 weapons.

Until Wednesday 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 Daesh. 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.

Two police sources and a source close to the investigation told Reuters that the St Denis cell was planning a fresh attack. “This new team was planning an attack on La Defence,” one source said, referring to a high-rise neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris that is home to top banks and businesses.

A man in St Denis told reporters that he had rented out the besieged apartment 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.

Aircraft carrier

Global anxiety was reflected in a flurry of new security alerts on Wednesday after a football match between Germany and the Netherlands was cancelled on Tuesday evening in response to what a senior politician called a “concrete indication” of danger.

Sweden raised its threat level by one step to four on a scale of five, the high-speed Eurostar train that connects Paris and London briefly suspended check-in at Paris’s Gare du Nord and several German Bundesliga football teams said they were beefing up security ahead of their matches.

The Russian air force on Wednesday carried out a “mass strike” on Islamic State positions around Syria, including Raqqa, Russian news agencies reported.

Paris and Moscow are not coordinating their air strikes in Syria, but French President Francois Hollande is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on November 26 to discuss how their countries’ militaries might work together.

Hollande will meet US President Barack Obama, who says Russia must shift its focus from “propping up” Syrian President Bashar Assad, two days before that in Washington.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Western nations had to drop their demands for Assad’s exit if they wanted to build a coalition against Daesh.

Russia is allied to Assad but the West says he must go if there is to be a political solution to Syria’s prolonged civil war. Hollande said countries should set aside their sometimes diverging national interests to battle their common foe.

“The international community must rally around that spirit. I know very well that each country doesn’t have the same interests,” he told an assembly of city mayors on Wednesday.

A French aircraft carrier group was headed to the eastern Mediterranean to intensify the number of strikes in Syria. Russia has said its navy will cooperate with this mission.