With France under a state of emergency that gives police special powers, the hunt continued for members of the cell that carried out last Friday’s gun and bomb attacks.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the police arrested 23 people and recovered a Kalashnikov and other weapons during the overnight raids.
At least one key suspect is on the loose. The arrest warrant for 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, brother of bomber Brahim, describes him as very dangerous and warns people not to intervene if they see him.
French officials revealed that police had him in their grasp early on Saturday, when they stopped a car carrying three men near the Belgian border. By then, hours had passed since authorities identified Abdeslam as the renter of a Volkswagen Polo that carried hostage takers to the Paris theatre where many died.
Three French police officials and a top French security official confirmed that officers let Abdeslam go after checking his ID. Tantalizing clues about the extent of the plot have emerged from Baghdad, where senior Iraqi officials told AP that France and other countries had been warned on Thursday of an imminent attack.
An Iraqi intelligence dispatch warned that Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had ordered his followers to immediately launch gun and bomb attacks and take hostages inside the countries of the coalition fighting them in Iraq and Syria.
Most of suspects have links to France or Belgium
French authorities have identified several suspects in the Paris attacks, most with links to France or Belgium.
A French official identified the suspected mastermind as Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is said to be linked to the thwarted attacks on a Paris-bound high-speed train and a Paris area church earlier this year. The official has direct knowledge of the investigation but is not authorised to be publicly identified as speaking about the probe. As efforts were being made to capture those behind the attacks, more details have emerged of those who carried them out.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said Monday one of the suicide bombers who blew himself up in the Bataclan music hall Friday night was Samy Amimour, a 28-year-old Frenchman charged in a terrorism investigation in 2012. Amimour was placed under judicial supervision, but dropped off authorities’ radar in 2013 and an international arrest warrant was issued.
An attacker who blew himself up outside the national soccer stadium was said to have been found with a Syrian passport with the name Ahmad Al Mohammad, a 25-year-old born in Idlib. The prosecutor’s office said fingerprints from the attacker match those of someone who passed through Greece in October. Another, said to have been identified by the print on a recovered finger, was 29-year-old Frenchman Ismael Mostefai, who had a record of petty crime and had been flagged in 2010 for ties to Islamic radicalism.
