French police secure the area as shots are exchanged in St. Denis, France, near Paris, November 18, 2015 during an operation to catch fugitives from Friday night's deadly attacks in the French capital.
Did authorities in France stop another terrorist cell before another attack?
A French prosecutor says a team of terrorists was ready to act when police raided an apartment in St.-Denis on Wednesday.
Eight people were arrested and two others died in the raid. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, whom officials have identified as the mastermind of the Paris attacks, was not one of those detained, authorities said. The Washington Post cited two European officials as saying Abaaoud was killed in the raid, but France had not confirmed that report by Wednesday night.
One of those who died detonated an explosive vest similar to that used the attacks Friday evening in Paris, one of the deadliest terrorist actions in the West since 9/11. ISIS claimed responsibility, prompting France to bombard an ISIS stronghold in eastern Syria and US warplanes to blow up oil trucks in Syria used by the terror group.
Residents of St.-Denis, a city outside Paris with high unemployment, crime and a large Muslim population, heard the explosions and gunfire, saw the masked police and paramilitary units and assailants in a seven-hour gunbattle.
"Who is not afraid of death? At my age I shouldn't be afraid,'' says Youssef Lounis, an Algerian native who has lived for decades in the neighborhood, which is the final resting place for France's kings.
"I know the story of France. We should not worry about our reputation. This is a Royal City — all the kings are here," Lounis says.
The person the French investigators most wanted to find there was Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian citizen of Moroccan descent.
“He’s believed to be a senior Islamic State operative,” says Grainne McCarthy, Paris bureau bhief for the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal’s sources, Abaaoud was senior enough in ISIS for Western nations to have planned air strikes to kill him in Syria in the weeks before the Paris attacks.
“He’s connected to a failed plot earlier this year, outside the Belgian capital Brussels, where apparently the plot was to behead Belgian police officers,” says McCarthy. “Police foiled that plot just after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January. Two of his suspected accomplices were killed.”
Abaaoud then went on the lam. A Belgian court convicted Abaaoud on terrorism charges, in absentia, but embarrassingly he managed to elude an international manhunt.
He appeared in an ISIS propaganda video filmed in Syria soon after, and also in an ISIS magazine interview. In both, Abaaoud bragged about how easy it was to fool European border security officials. It now appears that he was traveling back and forth between Syria and Europe.
Abaaoud has also been linked to the failed attack on a train that was foiled by young Americans and others back in August. “French and Belgian intelligence services suspect that,” says McCarthy.
He first gained notoriety in 2014 for recruiting his 13-year-old brother and taking him to Syria to become "the youngest jihadi." That caused a major rift in his family. In fact, his father appears to have sued Abdelhamid for abducting and kidnapping his kid brother.
Leo Hornak contributed to this report from St.-Denis.
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