‘Suspects had planned attack on business district’

Suspected Islamist militants uncovered in a Paris suburb by police were planning an attack on the French capital’s La Defence business district, a source close to the investigation and two police sources said on Wednesday.

A woman suicide bomber blew herself up and another militant died when police raided the apartment in the St. Denis suburb as part of the investigation into last week’s coordinated bombings and shootings.

“The police forces were looking for terrorists who were preparing another attack on the basis of information from the (local) counter-terrorism services and overseas,” said the source close to the investigation.

“This new team was planning an attack on La Defence.”

The French interior ministry declined to confirm or deny the information.

Officials said the police had been hunting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamist militant accused of ordering the Nov. 13 attack, but more than eight hours after the launch of the pre-dawn raid it was still unclear if they had found him.

Seven people were arrested in the operation including three people who were pulled from the apartment, officials said.

“It is impossible to tell you who was arrested. We are in the process of verifying that. Everything will be done to determine who is who,” Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said at the end of the operation.

Meanwhile, the St. Denis suburb turned into a virtual war zone.

“It’s like war”, said a resident of Saint-Denis, a suburb north of Paris, as gunfire and explosions echoed through narrow cobble-stoned streets, helicopters buzzed in the night-sky, and snipers took up position on rooftops.

In a pre-dawn raid aimed at nabbing the prime suspect in Friday’s brutal Paris attacks, troops spilled from vehicles to fan out by one of France’s most fabled monuments, the 12th century Saint-Denis Basilica housing the tombs of its ancient kings.

Police snipers scaled rooftops, officers smashed down the doors of a nearby church with axes and elite anti-terror squads stormed a building, evacuating terrified residents on the way, some of them still in their underwear.

A 26-year-old who’d slept over with friends emerged to head to the subway nearby just as the raid began in the Rue de Corbillon.

Hearing gunshots, “I thought it was a shoot-out between criminals,” she said.

“I’d never have imagined terrorists might be hiding out here. I could’ve been hit by a stray bullet.”

As police shouted at people hanging out of windows after being woken by the noise to keep back, bleary-eyed residents straggled into the streets to be pushed behind a police cordon.

Soldiers deployed along the town’s normally busy main street where shop shutters remained closed.

After dawn broke, local authorities ordered all schools closed for the day and public transport suspended, including the Saint-Denis stop on the underground Metro rail system.

A man arrested during the assault said he had lent his apartment, the one targeted by the raid, to two people from Belgium as a favour to a friend.

“A friend asked me to put up two of his friends for a few days,” he said.

The police was out to catch the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks that killed 129 people and left more than 350 injured.

Separately, a cell phone has been found near the site of one of Friday's Paris shootings with a map of the music venue that was attacked and a text message on it saying words to the effect of “let's go”, a source with knowledge of the investigations said.