Anti-Terrorism Raids Launched Across France in Wake of Paris Attacks

The raid destroyed an ISIL command post, a recruitment centre, a munitions depot and a training camp, the defence ministry said.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian militant who had boasted of mounting attacks in Europe for the Islamic State, was accused of orchestrating last Friday’s coordinated bombings and shootings in the French capital, which killed 129 people. Belgian police on Monday donned balaclavas and assault rifles as they mounted a tense hourslong standoff outside Abdeslam’s suspected hideout in the Brussels district of Molenbeek but made no arrests after storming the residence.

The radical Islamist group that calls itself Islamic State has said that it carried out the attacks.

French police have launched an global hunt for a Belgian-born man they believe helped organise the assaults with two of his brothers.

The official, who has direct knowledge of the investigation, was not authorized to be publicly identified as speaking about the ongoing probe.

Mr Fergus is certain the terrorists were trained by Islamic State in the Middle East, either in Iraq or Syria.

“It would be nearly inconceivable to think that a local cell would be able to gather all of the resources and capabilities, a few of which are clearly from offshore, outside of France, to put this together”, he said.

France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim population, has since suffered the blowback with a spate of acts of violence by radicalised Muslims, including January attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket.

The search for the perpetrators of the Paris attacks has led authorities across the Belgian border to an impoverished suburb of Brussels with a history of links to terror plots.

Seven attackers died – six after detonating suicide belts and a seventh from police gunfire – but Iraqi intelligence officials told The Associated Press that its sources indicated 19 participated in the attack and five others provided hands-on logistical support.

A USA official briefed on intelligence matters said Abaaoud was a key figure in an Islamic State external operations cell that US intelligence agencies have been tracking for many months.

“The bad attacks that were directed against us on Friday were prepared overseas by a group of individuals based in Belgium who, as the investigation will show, benefited from accomplices in France”, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in Paris on Sunday.

The horrendous attacks on Paris have an eerie resemblance to the events of September 11, 2001, in that they seem to have caught everyone off guard. He was identified by fingerprints and was believed to have been radicalized in 2010 but had never been accused of terrorism, Molins said. One of the brothers died in the attacks, while the second is under arrest in Belgium, a judicial source said.

A passport found on one of the gunman appeared to be that of Syrian refugee who registered in Greece during the summer and followed the migrant route through Europe. “That’s what struck me, his childish face, very determined, cold, calm, frightening”, Pearce said.

French media reported there had been arrests in Grenoble, in south-eastern France, where anti-terror officers had recovered firearms and cash.

Meanwhile, France has begun three days of national mourning. French troops have deployed by the thousands and tourist sites remain shuttered in one of the most visited cities on Earth.

But in a sign of just how shaken people are, the sound of fire-crackers at Place de la Republique, where mourners were standing in quiet solidarity, sent scores fleeing in panic before they realised it was a false alarm. “Whoever starts running starts everyone else running”, said a city councilwoman, Alice Carton, who was at the square.