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Manhunt Over Paris Attacks Spreads Across France and Belgium Manhunt Over Paris Attacks Spreads Across France and Belgium
(about 3 hours later)
PARIS — A manhunt for a suspected terrorist involved in the Paris attacks spread across France and Belgium on Thursday, as the French authorities confirmed that an Islamic State militant suspected of orchestrating the attacks was killed in a police raid the day before. VERVIERS, Belgium — Black smudges and faded traces of gunfire on a red brick rowhouse here in eastern Belgium mark the death foretold of Abdelhamid Abaaoud. It is the spot where, 11 months before the announcement on Thursday that he had been killed outside Paris, he began plotting an elaborate campaign of terror across Europe.
Police officers have broken down doors in towns and villages from Paris to Brussels in more than 600 raids and searches since Friday, arresting scores of suspected militants. Lawmakers in France moved Thursday to adopt new powers they said were intended to enhance the ability of law enforcement agencies to pursue suspected terrorists. Mr. Abaaoud’s inaugural terror mission here ended in disaster for his cause and cost the lives of two of his jihadist friends — both from his old Brussels neighborhood, Molenbeek — when Belgian security forces stormed their hide-out on Jan. 15.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said Thursday that the French authorities did not know for certain whether more suspects linked to the attacks that killed at least 129 people last week were still at large. But Mr. Abaaoud was not there. A telephone call he made shortly before the raid in Verviers to pass on instructions to those in the hide-out, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official said, was the last trace anybody had of him until the French police found on Wednesday what turned out to be his mutilated body after an early-morning shootout just north of Paris.
“We don’t know at this point in the investigation if there are groups, individuals, who are directly linked to the attack on Friday evening, in Paris, in St-Denis,” Mr. Valls told France 2 television. “We don’t know yet, one can imagine. That’s why the threat is still there.” His whereabouts had remained a constant source of mystery and suspected misinformation from his Islamic State handlers. That was, until the bloody raid in the Paris suburb of St.-Denis revealed the gaping holes in Europe’s system of open borders that allowed him to infiltrate France under the noses of the intelligence services across the Continent.
Mr. Valls added that investigators were still trying to establish what roles were played by the people arrested and killed in a raid in St-Denis on Wednesday, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Islamic State militant suspected of orchestrating the Paris attacks. But he added that “we can certainly imagine that this cell was about to stage new mass attacks in France.” He did not say what evidence was discovered in the raids to suggest new attacks were imminent. “Not a single piece of intelligence from a European country that he might have transited through before arriving in France was communicated to us suggesting that he might be in Europe and was heading towards France,” the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said Thursday at a news conference.
The police killed Mr. Abaaoud, but another suspect, Salah Abdeslam, is still on the run. Mr. Valls said that the authorities did not know whether Mr. Abdeslam was in France, his country of citizenship, or in Belgium, where he lived. Even as he defended the performance of the French service, Mr. Cazeneuve pleaded for more intelligence sharing, saying, “It is urgent for Europe to come together.”
Until Monday, French authorities did not even know that Mr. Abaaoud was in France; he was thought to be in Syria. Along the way, Mr. Abaaoud, 27, is believed to have organized a string of attacks that made him the most talked-about — and, in jihadist circles, feted — terrorist since Osama bin Laden.
The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, confirmed Mr. Abaaoud’s death on Thursday morning after fingerprint analysis, noting that his body was heavily riddled with wounds from gunfire and a grenade detonated during the raid. French intelligence officials have concluded that Mr. Abaaoud was involved in at least four of six terrorist plots foiled in France since the spring, Mr. Cazeneuve said.
“We do not know at this stage whether Abaaoud blew himself up or not,” Mr. Molins’s office said in a statement. Before his deadly ambitions culminated in the massacres in Paris on Friday that killed 129 people, those ambitions included a thwarted attack on a Sunday-morning congregation at a Paris church and an attack on a Paris-bound train this summer that was halted when passengers overpowered the gunman.
At least one other person died in the raid: a woman who opened fire on the police and then detonated a suicide vest, whom two French intelligence officials have identified as Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26, a cousin of Mr. Abaaoud. The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said in confirming Mr. Abaaoud’s death on Thursday that the delay in identifying the body, which was virtually pulverized, had been because it required fingerprint analysis. “We do not know at this stage whether Abaaoud blew himself up or not,” Mr. Molins’s office said.
Mr. Abaaoud’s death ended one chapter of the intense criminal investigation that began on Friday night, after three teams of terrorists, in a series of closely coordinated attacks, killed 129 people. Also killed in the raid was a woman identified by two French intelligence officials as Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26, who fired on police officers and then blew herself apart with a suicide vest.
The Belgian authorities on Thursday arrested nine people — seven of them as part of an investigation into Bilal Hadfi, 20, who detonated his explosive vest outside the Stade de France on Friday. Belgian police searched homes in the Brussels neighborhoods of Laeken, Uccle, Jette and Molenbeek. Molenbeek was the base of Mr. Abdeslam; his brother Ibrahim, who was one of the seven attackers who died; and Mr. Abaaoud. While Mr. Abaaoud’s death ended one chapter of the intense criminal investigation that began Friday night, a manhunt continued for one of his partners in Friday’s attacks, Salah Abdeslam, 26, a French citizen and another friend from Molenbeek.
French intelligence officials have concluded that Mr. Abaaoud was involved in at least four of six terrorist plots in France that have been foiled since the spring, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced at a news conference. The Belgian authorities also arrested nine people in a series of raids on Thursday — seven of them as part of an investigation into Bilal Hadfi, 20, also from Molenbeek, who detonated his explosive vest outside the Stade de France in the attacks last week.
Mr. Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen who was 27 or 28, went to Syria last year to fight with the Islamic State, but it was not until Monday that French authorities learned — through a foreign intelligence service — that he had returned to Europe, via Greece, Mr. Cazeneuve said. Mr. Abaaoud, a former drug dealer from the same borough of Brussels, had been on the radar of Western security forces since early 2014, when he moved to Syria, apparently via Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany, and began starring in ghoulish propaganda videos filmed by the Islamic State.
Mr. Cazeneuve said that investigators were looking into Mr. Abaaoud’s ties to three men: one who was arrested in France after returning from Turkey in June; a “jihadist” who was arrested in Istanbul in July before boarding a Prague-bound flight with a fake Swedish passport; and a would-be jihadist who was arrested in August and told French officials that he had been “trained and assigned by Abaaoud to perpetrate a violent act in France or in another European country.” But he emerged as an immediate menace when he began making telephone calls from Greece with instructions for a terrorist plot to comrades hiding here at No. 32 Rue de la Colline, a sleepy residential street near Belgium’s border with Germany.
Mr. Abaaoud had already been linked to a foiled terrorist plot in January in Verviers, eastern Belgium, in which two of his associates died; an April plot to attack a church in the southern Paris suburb of Villejuif; and an August attack aboard a high-speed train heading to Paris, in which a heavily armed man opened fire before being overpowered by other passengers. Belgian security listened in on his calls for days, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official involved in tracking him said.
Mr. Cazeneuve said “it is urgent for Europe to come together” to better share intelligence and prevent further attacks. He said that justice ministers from European Union member states would gather in Brussels on Friday for an emergency meeting on the matter. Describing him as the “hyphen” connecting the militant group in Syria and operatives in Europe, the official said Mr. Abaaoud had been planning to carry out “a huge attack” from Verviers, a down-on-its-luck former industrial town with many immigrants and few jobs.
On Thursday, there remained many unanswered questions, including how, exactly, Friday’s attacks were planned and organized and what role Mr. Abaaoud played in the larger Islamic State infrastructure. But in January, tipped off to his plans by the telephone surveillance, Belgian antiterrorism forces stormed the three-story home that two of Mr. Abaaoud’s friends and fellow militants had rented through an intermediary a few weeks earlier.
Mr. Abaaoud was born in Morocco and grew up in modest but by no means impoverished circumstances in Molenbeek, the gritty Brussels district that has emerged as a center of jihadist activity. His father, Omar, owned a clothing store, and the family lived nearby in a spacious if shabby corner home on the Rue de l’Avenir — Future Street — near the local police station. After a fierce gun battle that foreshadowed the one in St.-Denis that claimed Mr. Abaaoud’s life, the security force uncovered a cache of explosives and automatic weapons. Two suspected militants — both from Molenbeek, where Mr. Abaaoud grew up — were killed.
Despite his subsequent protests over the mistreatment of Muslims in Europe, he enjoyed privileges available to few immigrants, including admission to an exclusive Catholic school, the Collège St.-Pierre d’Uccle, in an upscale residential district of Brussels. Information about his whereabouts and plans was so closely held that intelligence officials in Brussels kept even the mayor of Verviers and its police chief unaware that the Islamic State had set up a safe house in their town and was planning a major attack.
He was given a place as a first-year student in the secondary school but stayed only a year. A school official said he had apparently flunked out. Others say he was dismissed for poor behavior. “I only heard about Abaaoud and what he was doing by reading the press,” said Marc Elsen, the town’s mayor at the time of the Jan. 15 assault on the hideaway controlled by Mr. Abaaoud.
He then drifted into a group in Molenbeek who engaged in various petty crimes. Among his friends were Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam, two brothers who lived just a few blocks from Mr. Abaaoud in Molenbeek. Ibrahim Abdeslam died in the attacks on Friday night, while Salah is the target of an international manhunt. He said he had gotten a call just 15 minutes before the raid to tell him that a “large-scale operation” by the federal police was about to take place a few hundred yards from his office. “Then I heard all the shooting,” he said. “It sounded like heavy artillery.”
It is not clear when and how Mr. Abaaoud became radicalized, but in 2010 he spent time in prison, a notorious breeding ground of Islamic militancy in Europe. To the dismay of his family, which had not seen him show any religious zeal, Mr. Abaaoud suddenly moved to Syria in the beginning of 2014, according to experts on jihadist activity who track Belgian militants. By Mr. Abaaoud’s own account of what happened, published in the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, the two men killed in the raid had been “together in the safe house and had their weapons and explosive ready.”
Soon after his arrival in Syria, where he stayed for a time in a grand villa in Aleppo used to house French-speaking jihadists, he explained his choice in a video: “All my life I have seen the blood of Muslims flow. I pray that God breaks the backs of those who oppose him” and “that he exterminates them,” he said. But they were overpowered by “more than 150 soldiers from both French and Belgian special forces” and “blessed with shahadah,” or martyrdom, he told the magazine, saying that was “what they had desired for so long.”
This year, the French magazine Paris Match found a film that showed Mr. Abaaoud grinning and making jokes as he dragged corpses behind a pickup truck to a mass grave, a showing that had already brought him to the attention of the counterterrorism authorities. He also persuaded his younger brother, Younes, who was still in Molenbeek and only 13, to join him in Syria in 2014. Younes left Belgium for Syria on his own, without being stopped by the authorities. Belgium officials said that this was a lie and that only Belgian forces had taken part.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud returned from Syria some time last year — via Greece, it now appears. In July, he was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison in connection with the Verviers plot, which was aimed at killing security officers. For Mr. Abaaoud, the police operation delivered a humiliating personal blow. The Islamic State had entrusted him with beginning what one of the group’s senior leaders, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, had promised a few months earlier would be a campaign of terror in Europe.
On Thursday, a woman answered the buzzer at the flat where Yasmina, Mr. Abaaoud’s sister, lives. She shouted: “Stop coming here, you’re terrorizing the neighborhood, I’m going to call the police!” The blow was made worse by two brothers’ success just a week earlier in attacking the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. A rival terrorist group in Yemen, affiliated with Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for that. The Islamic State claimed a separate attack two days later on a Jewish supermarket in Paris, but that was more a “lone wolf” attack inspired rather than directed by the group.
The raids in Belgium largely focused on the relatives and friends of Mr. Hadfi. They had been scheduled before the Paris attacks, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor in Brussels said, but gained urgency afterward. Jihadist groups are “always competing,” said Jelle van Buuren, an expert on jihadists at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. “Who’s the best, who’s the most violent, who’s the most successful?”
Mr. Hadfi, who is a French citizen, lived in the Neder-over-Heembeek district of Brussels with his mother and three other siblings. Mr. Abaaoud’s failure so soon after the successful Charlie Hebdo attacks may have galvanized him to organize and conduct an even more spectacular assault like the one in Paris last week, Mr. van Buuren added.
The newspaper La Libre quoted his mother, Fatima, describing Mr. Hadfi as a “pressure cooker” and saying: “I felt that he was going to explode one day or the next.” He described Mr. Abaaoud as “a type who is so proud of his image, the big warrior of the caliphate, that he was more than willing to take this role.”
Before he left for Syria, Mr. Hadfi told his mother that he was traveling to Morocco to visit his father’s grave. The day before he left, “he wasn’t in his normal state,” the mother told the newspaper. “When he came over to the house his eyes were red,” she said. “He took me in his arms. He knew that it was a departure with no return.” To add to the pressure to perform, Mr. Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief propagandist and champion of its expansion into the West, issued an appeal shortly after the Verviers fiasco that cursed any Muslim “who has the ability to shed a single drop of crusader blood but does not do so, whether with an explosive device, a bullet, a knife, a car, a rock, or even a boot or a fist.”
Four days after he left, Fatima said, her daughter and two other sons came with the news that Mr. Hadfi had gone to Syria. Previously, he had smoked cigarettes and marijuana, but he gave up those habits as he became steadily more religious and politicized, his mother said. It was the duty of all Muslims, he said, “in Europe and the disbelieving West and everywhere else, to target the crusaders in their own lands and wherever they are found.”
A senior Belgian counterterrorism official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss ongoing investigations, adding that Mr. Hadfi had been on a list of foreign fighters who had gone to Syria. Mr. Adnani, following the Islamic State’s custom of casting defeats as victories, still added the failed operation in Belgium to a list of successes that included a shooting at the Canadian Parliament and the January attacks in Paris. But he put Belgium last.
Both France and Belgium remained on high alert. Mr. Valls, the French prime minister, said an attack using “chemical or biological weapons” could not be ruled out, and his Belgian counterpart, Charles Michel, asked Parliament to approve a variety of strict new security measures. If the Verviers debacle helped fire Mr. Abaaoud’s zeal, it also prompted him to improve his terrorist tradecraft. He stopped using the telephone, or at least one that could be listened in on.
Security officials believe that the Paris attackers used some kind of encrypted communication, though they let their guard down by tossing a cellphone into a trash can near the Bataclan theater, the site of the most deaths in Friday’s attacks. The geolocation services on the phone led investigators to one of the attackers’ hide-outs.
With the carnage on Friday, Mr. Abaaoud put the Verviers disaster behind him. A dropout, he became, in the words of the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, “one of the brains” behind the deadliest assault on Paris since World War II.
Where Mr. Abaaoud was at the time of the Verviers raid is unclear. He suggested in his interview with Dabiq that he had been somewhere in Belgium and had managed to evade detection and travel back to Syria.
But the Belgian security official, noting that much of what the Islamic State says is untrue, said Mr. Abaaoud had not been in Belgium: He had called from Greece with instructions shortly before the house was stormed. That call, the official said, was the last trace security agencies had of him.
Whether Mr. Abaaoud was in Belgium at all in this period is not known, the official said. It is easy, he added, to move around Europe without leaving a trace, especially for a citizen of Belgium, part of the 26-nation zone in Europe that allows visa-free travel.
Who knew what, and when, about Mr. Abaaoud’s travels is now a source of friction among European countries, which have opened their borders to one another but not their intelligence.
Far-right politicians, in particular, have seized on his travels to rally public support to end what was the proudest achievement of Europe’s postwar push for more integration: the so-called Schengen Area of visa-free travel.
“It seems that just about anybody can freely enter France now, with no checks, including somebody as dangerous and well known as Abdelhamid Abaaoud,” Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front said on Thursday.
“The absence of national borders is criminal madness,” Ms. Le Pen said. “The French elites have given themselves over to this surreal myth of a country without borders. Open your eyes, now!”