Two attackers killed in Paris were Frenchmen who lived in Brussels

Two of the attackers behind Friday’s assault on Paris were French nationals who had been in living in Brussels, Belgian officials said on Sunday as Prime Minister Charles Michel declared his nation was no place for “preachers of hatred”.

The investigation quickly spread beyond France on Saturday as Belgian police arrested several suspects in Brussels, including one who was in Paris at the time of the carnage.

Salah Abdeslam rented a Belgian-registered VW Polo that was parked outside the Bataclan concert hall where 89 people died.

Investigators in France and elsewhere have begun making arrests as they begin to uncover the identities and backstories of the terrorists who killed more than 120 people in gun and bomb attacks across Paris. Another one of their siblings is said to have been killed in the rampage at one of the world’s most visited cities, the authorities said.

Abaaoud – a 27-year-old Belgian of Moroccan descent who allegedly led the group and had fought with the Islamic State group in Syria – remains at large.

The arrests – local media said three people were detained – were in connection with a vehicle found near the Bataclan concert hall, they said.

Seven of the terrorists were killed, mostly by blowing themselves up, according to French officials. “Those who organized these attacks, and those who carried them out, are exactly those who the refugees are fleeing”, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters at the G-20 summit in Turkey.

With a few districts in Molenbeek comprised of a population that is 80% Muslim, and a suspicion of Belgian authorities among many immigrant communities, police have struggled to gather useful intelligence to identify and prevent such militant attacks.

– Police in Belgium arrested seven people in connection to the Paris attacks, the public broadcaster RTBF in Belgium reports. Experts say they demonstrate I.S.’s evolution from localized operations in Iraq and Syria to the West. “The push to France likely represents the next stage of I.S.”, said Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

US President Barack Obama described the onslaught as “an attack on all of humanity” and an emotional Pope Francis said he was “shaken” by the “inhuman” attacks.

On Saturday, the mayor of the French town of Chartres named one of the seven known attackers as Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old French national of Algerian descent who apparently lived in Chartres until at least 2012. “They were checked at the border between France and Belgium”.

The death toll rose Sunday in the Paris terror attacks with the deaths of three patients who had been critically injured, hospitals reported.

The neighbourhood of Molenbeek, which has been involved in many previous terror attacks, was last night emerging as a key centre of the plot. “We will hit this enemy to destroy them, obviously in France and Europe … but also in Syria and Iraq”, he said.

French authorities also asked their Greek counterparts for information on the passport found at the scene of the Stade de France attack.

The Seat was found abandoned in the eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil with three Kalashnikov automatic rifles inside, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported Sunday.

Other reports say at least one of the terrorists had entered France hidden among the migrant wave that has flooded Europe in recent months. The attacker, who was involved in the assault and hostage-taking at the Bataclan concert hall, was identified by fingerprints and was believed to have been radicalized in 2010 but had never been accused of terrorism, Molins said. He said he had ordered that 104 people be put under house arrest since the attacks. All three gunmen in the January attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a kosher supermarket in Paris were French.

The European Union said it would hold a meeting of its interior and justice ministers next Friday to assess the impact of the Paris attacks.

“Whoever starts running starts everyone else running”, said Alice Carton, city council member who was at the square.

French anti-terrorism authorities had been aware of Amimour: he had been charged for “activities in collaboration with a terrorist enterprise” in 2012, the prosecutor’s office said in its statement.