Paris attacks: French police raids homes, says it’s just beginning

The police raided homes of suspected Islamist militants across France overnight arresting 23 people, and investigators identified a Belgian national living in Syria as the possible mastermind behind Friday’s attacks in Paris.

Prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants — four Frenchmen and a foreigner fingerprinted in Greece in October. His role in the carnage has fuelled speculation that ISIS took advantage of a recent wave of refugees fleeing Syria to slip militants into Europe.

The police believe one attacker is on the run, and are working on the assumption that at least four people helped organise the mayhem, the worst atrocity in France since World War II, which appears to have been organised in neighbouring Belgium.

The Belgian police arrested at least one person after a four-hour siege on Monday at a house in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, home to many Muslim immigrants, but failed to find a man believed to have played a key role in the assault.

ISIS, which claimed responsibility for the attacks in retaliation for French airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, warned in a video on Monday that any country hitting it would suffer the same fate, promising specifically to target Washington.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters that the police had arrested nearly two dozen people and seized arms, including a rocket launcher and automatic weapons, in 168 raids overnight. Another 104 people were put under house arrest, he said.

“Let this be clear to everyone, this is just the beginning, these actions are going to continue,” Mr Cazeneuve said.

The Police in Brussels have detained two suspects and are hunting Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman based in the Belgian capital, who is one of three brothers believed to have been involved in the plot.

Hours after the attacks, the French police questioned and released Abdelslam, who was in a getaway car headed for France’s border with Belgium when police pulled the car over after daybreak on Saturday. The French President had already announced new border controls to prevent the perpetrators from escaping.

Hours had passed since investigators identified Abdelslam as the renter of a Volkswagen Polo that carried hostage-takers to the Paris theater where almost three-quarters of the victims were killed.

It’s not clear why the local police, known as gendarmes, didn’t take Abdelslam into custody. They checked his identification, but it’s not known whether they had been informed of his apparent connection to the attacks.

“It was a simple check. There was no lookout notice at the time of the traffic stop,” a French police official said on Sunday.

Asked whether Abdelslam’s name had been shared over police networks by then, the official simply said: “I have no explanation.”

Schools and museums in Paris re-opened on Monday after a 48-hour shutdown, but some popular tourist sites, including Disneyland and the Eiffel Tower, remained closed.

French tourism-related stocks fell sharply on fears visitors might shun Paris, one of the most visited cities in the world, but the country’s blue-chip CAC 40 index was steady, with no long-term economic impact seen.

The police have named two French attackers — Ismael Omar Mostefai, 29, from Chartres, southwest of Paris, and Samy Amimour, 28, from the Paris suburb of Drancy. A source close to the investigation named two other French assailants as Bilal Hadfi and Ibrahim Abdeslam.

Latest official figures estimate that 520 French nationals are in the Syrian and Iraqi war zones, including 116 women. Some 137 have died in the fighting, 250 have returned home and around 700 have plans to travel to join the jihadist factions.

The man stopped in Greece in October was carrying a Syrian passport in the name of Ahmad Al Mohammad. The police said they were still checking to see if the document was authentic, but said the dead man’s fingerprints matched those on record in Greece.

Greek officials said the passport holder had crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands in October and then registered for asylum in Serbia before heading north, following a route taken by hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in 2015.

Britain announced on Monday it would boost its intelligence agency staff by 15 per cent and more than double spending on aviation security to defend against Islamist militants plotting attacks from Syria.

A source in PM David Cameron’s office said the police had foiled one attack in Britain in October.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the French authorities would use every means at their disposal to counter the Islamist threat, adding that mosques harbouring extremists would be shuttered and foreigners expelled if they “held unacceptable views against the republic”.