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 Prosecutors said one of the killers had been stopped and
fingerprinted in Greece last month, fuelling speculation the Islamic
State had taken advantage of the recent influx of refugees fleeing
the Middle East to slip militants into Europe.
The Paris carnage, which killed 129 people, has led to calls for the
European Union to close its borders to asylum seekers.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned France could be hit by new
violence but said the Islamic State, which has claimed
responsibility for the attacks in retaliation for French airstrikes
in Iraq and Syria, would never win.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told journalists on Monday
police arrested 23 people and seized arms including rocket launchers
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," Cazeneuve said.
French warplanes pounded Islamic State positions in its Syrian
stronghold Raqqa late Sunday -- its biggest such strike since it
started assaults as part of a U.S.-led mission launched in 2014.
The investigation into the coordinated Paris attacks, the worst
atrocity in France since World War Two, led swiftly to Belgium after
police discovered that two of the cars used by the militants had
been rented in the Brussels region.
By Sunday, Belgian officials said they had arrested seven people in
Brussels, while another man -- one of three brothers believed to
have been involved in the plot -- was being hunted.
A source close to the investigation said Belgian national Abdelhamid
Abaaoud, currently in Syria, was suspected of having ordered the
Paris operation. "He appears to be the brains behind several planned
attacks in Europe," the source told Reuters.
French prosecutors say they have identified five of the seven
suicide attackers who died on Friday. Four were French, while the
fifth man was fingerprinted in Greece in October and was possibly
Syrian.
Valls said that since this summer, French intelligence services had
prevented five attacks.
"We know that more attacks are being prepared, not just against
France but also against other European countries," Valls told RTL
radio. "We are going to live with this terrorist threat for a long
time."
SYRIAN CONNECTION
The death toll was revised back down to 129 following a counting
error. Dozens of people remain in intensive care.
France has declared three days of national mourning and President
Francois Hollande will make a rare address to the joint upper and
lower houses of parliament later in the day at the Palace of
Versailles, just outside Paris.
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Schools in Paris re-opened on Monday, and many museums were due to
open their doors in the afternoon after a 48-hour shutdown, but some
popular tourist sites, including Disneyland, remained closed.
Police have named just two French attackers -- Ismael Omar Mostefai,
29, from Chartres, southwest of Paris, and Samy Amimour, 28, from
the Paris suburb of Drancy. Media named the two other French
assailants as Bilal Hadfi and Ibrahim Abdeslam.
The man stopped in Greece in October was carrying a Syrian passport
in the name of Ahmad Al Mohammad. 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 last month and then registered for asylum in
Serbia before heading north, following a route taken by hundreds of
thousands of asylum seekers this year.
The news revived a furious row within the European Union on how to
handle the flood of refugees. Top Polish and Slovak officials poured
cold water on an EU plan to relocate asylum seekers across the bloc,
saying the violence underlined their concerns about taking in Muslim
refugees.
Britain announced on Monday it would boost its intelligence agency
staff by 15 percent and more than double spending on aviation
security to defend against Islamist militants plotting attacks from
Syria.
A source in British Prime Minister David Cameron's office said
police had foiled one attack against the country last month.
Valls said the French authorities would use every means at their
disposal to counter the Islamist threat, adding that mosques
harboring extremists would be shuttered and foreigners expelled if
they "held unacceptable views against the republic".
(Additional reporting by Matthias Blamont, John Irish, Leigh Thomas,
Ingrid Melander, Michael Nienaber, Marine Pennetier, Robert-Jan
Bartunek and Claire Watson; writing by Crispian Balmer; Editing by
Sonya Hepinstall)
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