Who were the Paris attackers? Many crossed officials’ radar

Only days after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris and a Jewish supermarket, Abaaoud, 27, had been directing an ISIS cell in Belgium by phone from Athens.

The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks Abdelhamid Abaaoud evaded cops in Greece following a failed operation to capture him months before the terror atrocity.

The BBC’s Belgian anti-terror source said that the Athens operation was scheduled to take place prior to a separate terror raid in Verviers, Belgium.

Two suspected jihadis died in that gun battle.

Five days after the Paris attacks, which left 130 people dead and hundreds injured, Abaaoud was killed in a police raid in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.

The reasons remain unclear, but it’s believed there may have been a failed attempt to monitor Abaaoud in a public square by tracing his mobile phone signal. But that did not work.

Two days after the Verviers operation, Greek police carried out raids at two apartments in Athens. But Abaaoud, a Belgian national of Moroccan origin, was nowhere to be found.

Athens police did, however, carry out two raids on January 17.

It is now known that traces of DNA recovered in both flats match samples recovered from Abaaoud’s body in Paris.

A neighbour, Vasilis Katsanos, told the BBC he had seen Abaaoud in the street several times. He reportedly had been implicated in four of six foiled terrorist attacks by the Islamic State group in France this year.

Abaaoud is not the only link between Greece and the Paris attacks.

And two of the suicide bombers who attacked the Stade de France had posed as refugees, as they crossed by boat from Turkey to the island of Leros in October.

Another of the Paris attackers – Salah Abdeslam – also had a Greek connection.