Mass police mobilisation in France, 128 raids conducted

French police carried out another 120 raids overnight on suspected ISIS supporters, while warplanes launched more attacks on ISIS targets in Syria.

Less than 48 hours later he was killed when heavily armed police stormed an apartment complex in the northern suburb of Saint Denis at dawn, triggering a massive firefight and explosions.

The main suspect in coordinating the Paris terror attacks was killed in Wednesday’s raid on an apartment in Saint-Denis, the city’s chief prosecutor said Thursday.

According to the official, one of the officers asked: “Where is your boyfriend?” and she responded angrily: “He’s not my boyfriend!” before there was an explosion. A woman also in the apartment blew herself up with a suicide bomb vest or belt.

Police have yet to identify the third man they spotted in the video.

The raid had targeted Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Moroccan-born Belgian named as the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks and other attempted jihadist plots.

French President Francois Hollande remained adamant Wednesday that his country will still follow through on it commitment to take in 30,000 Syrian refugees, despite the recent terrorist attacks in Paris that left 129 dead and hundreds more wounded.

Abaaoud, a Belgian national now living in Syria where he has become an Internet propagandist for Islamic State under the nom de guerre Abu Omar Belgiki – the Belgian, is believed to be the mastermind of the attacks.

It has emerged the 28-year-old Belgian may also have been involved in four of six thwarted attacks in France this year, including an assault by a gunman on a high-speed train which was thwarted by three Americans. Martins said he got him released, and by the time the case came to court in 2010, his client had turned his life around and the judge let him go.

Citing activists, the Observatory said Islamic State members and dozens of families of senior members had started fleeing Raqqa to relocate to Mosul in neighboring Iraq.

Bullet holes are pictured around a window on the back side of the house after an intervention of security forces against a group of extremists in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday, November 18, 2015.

France and Russia have vowed merciless retaliation for the Paris attacks and last month’s bombing of a Russian airliner over the Egyptian Sinai peninsula which killed 229 people and was also claimed by IS.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Wednesday the bombardments have killed at least 33 Islamic State militants over the past three days.

“We are weeks away conceivably from the possibility of a big transition for Syria”, Kerry said after talks with President Francois Hollande in Paris, where he was visiting to express solidarity with the French nation after Friday’s terror attacks. “Daesch has less territory”, he said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

He was speaking as he presented a bill to extend the state of emergency declared after last Friday’s massacre to three months. But two USA officials said that many, though not all, of those identified were on the U.S.no-fly list.

In a statement earlier, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that since France instituted a state of emergency, authorities had conducted 414 searches, arrested 64 people and confined 118 people to their homes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly.