French prosecutor believes Abdelhamid Abaaoud was plotting suicide attack on La Défense district last week before he was killed in police raid
The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was planning a second wave of attacks in the city but was killed days before he could carry them out, French authorities have said.
François Molins, the public prosecutor of Paris, told reporters on Tuesday that Abdelhamid Abaaoud intended to carry out a double suicide bombing targeting business district La Défense on 18 or 19 November.
Molins also said that immediately after the attacks, which left 130 dead and hundreds more injured, Abaaoud spent nearly two hours within a few hundred metres of the cafes which his accomplices had struck with bombs and automatic rifle fire. He also appeared to have been close to the Bataclan concert hall, where the heaviest loss of life occurred, even while police were still exchanging fire with terrorists inside.
Five days after the attacks, Abaaoud was among three people killed during a police raid on an apartment in St-Denis, a northern Paris suburb
Police across Europe have intensified efforts to trace all those linked to the attacks. One key suspect is Salah Abdeslam, a Frenchman living in Brussels who is suspected of handling logistics for the operation and whose brother was among the suicide bombers.
Abdeslam fled from Paris to Belgium in the hours after the attack and has so far evaded a massive dragnet by local authorities.
On Tuesday German police launched a search for the 26-year-old after a possible sighting near Hanover, in the northwest, but found no evidence to confirm his presence or passage.
“The suspicion has not been confirmed. There is no indication that Salah Abdeslam was present in the area,” a spokesperson said.
Belgian police on Tuesday issued an international search warrant for another man, Mohamed Abrini, seen with Abdeslam two days before the attacks in Paris. Images taken from cameras at a petrol station showed the 30-year-old man, who authorities described as “dangerous and probably armed”, driving a car with Abdeslam on a motorway heading to the French capital.
Authorities have maintained a massive security operation in Brussels since alerting the population to a “serious and imminent” threat of terrorist attack over the weekend.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/belgian-police-hunt-mohamed-abrini-seen-in-car-with-paris-attacks-ringleader
