PARIS, (Reuters) – The suspected Islamic State mastermind of the Paris attacks was among those killed in a police raid north of the capital, France confirmed yesterday, bringing an end to the hunt for Europe’s most wanted man. Authorities said they had identified the mangled corpse of Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud from fingerprints in the aftermath of Wednesday’s raid and gunbattle in which at least two people died including a female suicide bomber. “The spider in the web is no longer a danger,” Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said, calling it a “breakthrough”.
The body had been found riddled with holes amid the wreckage in the aftermath of Wednesday’s raid, Paris’s prosecutor said in a statement. The prosecutor later added that it was unclear whether Abaaoud had detonated a suicide belt.
The Moroccan-born Belgian militant, 28, was accused of orchestrating last Friday’s coordinated bombings and shootings in the French capital, which killed 129 people. Seven assailants died in the attack and a suspected eighth is still on the run.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls broke the news of Abaaoud’s death to parliament yesterday to applause from French lawmakers who were voting to extend a state of emergency for three months.
“We know today … that the mastermind of the attacks – or one of them, let’s remain cautious – was among those dead,” Valls told reporters.
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Even before last week’s attacks, Abaaoud was one of Islamic State’s highest-profile European recruits, prominently profiled in the group’s slick online English-language magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of crossing European borders to stage attacks. The group, which controls swathes of Iraq and Syria, has attracted thousands of young Europeans, and Abaaoud was seen as a leading figure in luring others to join, particularly from his home country Belgium. He claimed to have escaped a continent-wide manhunt after a police raid in Belgium in 2013 in which two other militants were killed. His own family has disowned him, accusing him of abducting his 13-year-old brother, who was later promoted on the Internet as Islamic State’s youngest foreign fighter in Syria. While quickly tracking him down will be seen as a major success for French authorities, his presence in Paris will focus more attention on the difficulty European security services have in monitoring the continent’s borders. Before the attacks, European governments thought Abaaoud was still in Syria. “This is a major failing,” said Roland Jaquard at the International Observatory for Terrorism.
French officials have called for changes to the functioning of the EU’s Schengen border-free travel zone, which normally does not monitor the entry and exit of citizens of its 26 countries. Hundreds of thousands of people have reached Europe as Syrian refugees in recent months, including at least one person using a passport found at the scene of Friday’s attacks.
