Paris attacks mastermind confirmed dead

PARIS

The main suspect in coordinating the Paris terror attacks was killed in Wednesday's raid on an apartment in Saint-Denis, the city’s chief prosecutor said Thursday.

The body of Abdelhamid Abaaoud was identified after he was killed during a seven-hour stand-off with police in the north Paris suburb.

“Abdelhamid Abaaoud has just been formally identified, after comparing fingerprints, as having been killed during the raid,” the office of Chief Prosecutor Francois Molins said in a statement.

“It was the body we had discovered in the building, riddled with bullets.”

Abaaoud, 27, was identified as the possible mastermind of the attacks within hours of Friday night’s killings.

He had been thought to be in Syria but French authorities launched Wednesday's raid after having been led there by a tip-off and telephone surveillance suggesting Abaaoud was in France.

He had been linked to a number of terror attacks, including a shooting at a Jewish museum in Brussels in May last year that killed four and a foiled attack on a Paris-bound train in August. Abaaoud is also suspected by the Belgian authorities of helping to organize and fund a terror cell in eastern Belgium that was targeted in a police raid in January.

He was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Belgian court earlier this year after being tried in absentia for recruiting for Daesh.

Addressing lawmakers, Prime Minister Manuel Valls described Abaaoud as the “brain of these attacks”.

He added: “I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of our intelligence services and the police.”

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed the death and Abaaoud’s “key role” in the atrocity. He said Abaaoud was involved in four of six terror attacks foiled by the intelligence services, including an attempted church bombing in April.

“Of the six foiled projects in France since spring 2015, Abdelhamid Abaaoud seems to have been linked to four of them,” he told a news conference.

Abaaoud had asked a returning extremist to commit an attack in Europe, Cazeneuve added, citing the interrogation of a suspected militant carried out in August.

He said France had received no information from its neighbors that Abaaoud had returned to the country but that “intelligence services from outside Europe” tipped off French authorities to his hideout in Saint-Denis.

The attacks in the French capital saw 129 killed by at least eight attackers, seven of who died on the night. An eighth, Salah Abdeslam, is wanted and a ninth militant is also believed to be at large.