Paris prosecutor: Suspected Paris mastermind killed in raid

His body has been formally identified at the Rue de Corbillon in the Paris suburb following the raid at St-Denis, the prosecutor said.

The French Interior Ministry and Paris prosecutor’s office, meanwhile, said it still remains unclear whether the suspected mastermind of last week’s attacks, in which 129 people were killed and hundreds of others wounded, has been killed or is still at large.

Abdelhamid Abaoud, 27, lived in the Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels, as did two of the attackers, and is now believed to be based in Syria, where he has risen through the IS ranks. Two more people were arrested in another operation in Alsdorf, according to police.

Local residents spoke of their fear and panic as the shooting started in St. Denis just before 4.30 a.m. (2330 Tuesday ET). “It was the body we had discovered in the building, riddled with bullets”. “There were explosions. You could feel the whole building shake”, said Sabrine, a downstairs neighbor from the apartment that was raided.

A police official said officers exchanged gunfire with the people inside, and several police were injured.

Abdeslam was one of three men in a getaway auto, headed for France’s border with Belgium, when police pulled them over after daybreak Saturday.

Civilians in Raqqa, Syria are terrified because France and other USA allies have been bombing areas that have been abandoned by the Islamic State group for a long time and that the airstrikes have only succeeded in cutting off electricity and water supplies to the city, Al Jazeera reported Tuesday. The action, which was not immediately confirmed by Moscow, came hours after the Russian Federal Security Service confirmed that a bomb had exploded a Russian tourist airliner over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula last month and President Vladimir Putin vowed retribution. “Kalashnikovs. Starting again”, Guizani said.

He was reportedly an associate of Salah Abdeslam – a suspected attacker in the Friday attack in Paris who is the subject of an global manhunt – and his brother Brahim who blew himself up at the Comptoir Voltaire bar without taking any lives.

Paris prosecutor Molins said Wednesday that investigators found a cell phone in a garbage can outside the Bataclan concert hall in eastern Paris where 89 of the victims of Friday’s carnage died. Since then he has traveled back to Europe at least once and was involved in a series of planned attacks in Belgium foiled by the police last January. Eight people were arrested in the raid. One friend tweeted: ‘I have no words, only tears’. “I didn’t know them”, the unidentified man told BFMTV.

Police issued a photograph of the militant and asked the public for help in identifying him.

Authorities in the United States and Canada, where the planes landed, later said both aircraft had been searched and were safe.

“France is at war”, Mr Hollande told a solemn joint session of Parliament at the Palace of Versailles on Monday, promising to increase funds for national security and strengthen anti-terrorism laws in response to the attacks.

At the same briefing, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the number of strikes had been doubled, destroying 140 terrorist facilities in Syria using sea-launched cruise missiles and long-range bombers.