Paris mastermind believed to be Belgian in Syria

French authorities have announced that Belgian sympathizers with the self-proclaimed Islamic State led the coordinated terrorist attack on Paris last Friday. On Monday, Belgian police surrounded a suspected hideout in the search for him but came up empty-handed after charging into the property.

Abdeslam reportedly rented it from 10 to today, 17 November.

Bilal Hadfi, 20, Suicide bomber involved in Stade de France attack.

Amimour was known to have links to terrorists and had been the subject of an global arrest warrant since 2013 after violating the judicial supervision he had been placed under, the prosecutor’s office said. “These actions are going to continue”, Cazeneuve said. “It was after that that we questioned him”.

“These are not regular people”, Mohamed Abdeslam, 29, said of his brothers.

Despite planning these attacks, Abaaoud has been able to evade European authorities, hiding out in Syria or Greece instead of Belgium or France, the target of his attacks. “But we had no knowledge of the fact that he was back in Europe”.

French security sources said a fourth terrorist had now been identified as Frenchman Samy Aminour, 28, after raids on addresses in the Parisian suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis and Bobigny linked to his family overnight.

France has also linked Abaaoud to the attack on a Paris-bound train in August, which was thwarted when three unarmed Americans, two of them off-duty US service members, subdued an assailant armed with an AK-47 and nine magazines of ammunition.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Friday night massacre which killed 129 people.

His voice can be heard on a few Islamic State videos, according to a French security source.

Abaaoud, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Umar al-Baljiki, has been on the run since police stormed a jihadist cell in the eastern Belgian town of Verviers in January. As for the whereabouts of his brother Salah, he told reporters: “We do not know where he is”.

France’s Interior Minister said police conducted an additional 128 raids on Tuesday morning, according to Agence France-Presse.

A manhunt for Salah Abdeslam-one of the attackers that’s still at large-across the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek left European authorities empty-handed. In neighbouring Belgium, police donning balaclavas and assault rifles mounted a tense hours-long standoff outside the suspected hideout of 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, who has been identified as the alleged driver of a rental vehicle that delivered attackers to the scene of greatest slaughter, a rock concert inside a nightclub.

France has declared three days of national mourning and President Francois Hollande will make a rare address to the joint upper and lower houses of parliament later in the day at the Palace of Versailles, just outside Paris.

Abdeslam is believed to be a longstanding associate of Abaaoud, with both men previously involved in gangs in Molenbeek that carried out robberies and other petty crime.

Abaaoud said he narrowly escaped from law enforcement, adding, “I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!”