Paris attacks: Confirmed; Mastermind dead

A third body has been found in the rubble of the apartment where the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was killed in a fierce shootout with police, prosecutors said Friday.

The identity of the person was not clear, but it is a woman, and not Salah Abdeslam, who remains the intense focus of an worldwide manhunt for his suspected involvement in the attacks that killed 129 people a week ago.

Officials said only Abaaoud’s body had been identified after the raid, which saw scores of SWAT team officers encounter fierce resistance from Abaaoud and a handful of accomplices.

France wiretapped Aitboulahcen’s phone, and while she did not speak to Abaaoud, she did get a call telling her that her “cousin” was coming.

USA intelligence warned in May that the so-called Islamic State militant group had developed the capability to carry out the kind of attack claimed by the extremist group in Paris and explicitly picked out the alleged mastermind.

Investigators revealed Friday that Abaaoud was caught on camera at a Paris Metro station in Montreuil, to the east of the capital, on the night of the attacks. “The UK will go ahead with obtaining records from those operating to and from the United Kingdom”, she said.

Aitboulahcen is believed to be the first female suicide bomber in Western Europe.

Authorities earlier identified one of the others killed in Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis as suspected mastermind of the massacres on Friday, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

The European Union ministers agreed at emergency talks in Brussels yesterday to tighten checks on all travellers at the borders of the passport-free Schengen zone, where citizens of 22 European Union countries, plus non-EU Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein, enjoy passport-free travel. Abaaoud was thought to have been in Syria – where he had boasted of planning attacks on the West.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Abaaoud was implicated in four thwarted French terror plots this year, deploring the fact that no-one had flagged his presence in Europe, according to Agence France-Presse.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the operation neutralised a “new terrorist threat”, and that “everything led us to believe that, considering their armaments, the structured organisation and their determination, they were ready to act”.

Parliament gave its approval to a package of new laws that paves the way for the country’s state of emergency to be extended by three months until late February and for actions against terror suspects to be stepped up.