Abdelhamid Abaaoud was killed in a gun battle on Wednesday when
police raided a house in a Paris suburb where he was holed up.
Prosecutors said a total of three people were killed in the pre-dawn
operation.
Abaaoud can be seen on closed circuit TV footage at the Croix de
Chavaux metro station in the Paris suburb of Montreuil, not far from
where one of the cars used in the attacks was found, the police
source said.
He was spotted on the tape at 10:14 p.m. (1614 ET) last Friday
evening after shootings at several cafes and suicide bombings near a
packed soccer stadium had taken place, but while an attack was still
under way at a concert hall.
A petty criminal who went to fight in Syria in 2013, Abaaoud is
believed to have recruited similar young men from immigrant families
in his native Brussels district of Molenbeek and elsewhere in
Belgium and France.
Before the attacks, European governments thought that Abaaoud was
still in Syria.
Abaaoud's mangled body was identified on Thursday. A woman's body
was identified as Hasna Aitboulahcen. Identification of the third
body was still in progress.
In the debris, a handbag was found containing a passport in the name
of Aitboulahcen. A source said previously that a woman with that
name may have blown herself up during the raid and may be a cousin
of Abaaoud.
Moroccan-born Abaaoud, 28, was accused of orchestrating last
Friday's attacks. Seven assailants died in the attacks and a
suspected eighth is still on the run.
Even before last week's attacks, Abaaoud was one of Islamic State's
highest-profile European recruits, appearing in the group's slick
online English-language magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of crossing
European borders to stage attacks.
The group, which controls swathes of Iraq and Syria, has attracted
thousands of young Europeans, and Abaaoud was seen as a leading
figure in luring others to join, particularly from his home country
Belgium. DISOWNED BY FAMILY
He claimed to have escaped a continent-wide manhunt after a police
raid in Belgium in 2013 in which two other militants were killed.
His own family has disowned him, accusing him of abducting his
13-year-old brother, who was later promoted on the Internet as
Islamic State's youngest foreign fighter in Syria.
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While quickly tracking him down will be seen as a major success for
French authorities, his presence in Paris will focus more attention
on the difficulty European security services have in monitoring the
continent's borders.
Europe’s interior ministers were meeting on Friday and were expected
to tighten security measures and external border checks.
France has called for changes to the functioning of the EU's
Schengen border-free travel zone, which normally does not monitor
the entry and exit of citizens of its 26 countries.
Hundreds of thousands of people have reached Europe as Syrian
refugees in recent months, including at least one person using a
passport found at the scene of Friday's attacks.
The French National Assembly voted to extend the state of emergency
for three months on Thursday. Belgium, stung by revelations that
several of the attackers were based there, announced a
400-million-euro ($430 million) security crackdown.
France has called for a global coalition to defeat the group and has
launched air strikes on Raqqa, the de-facto Islamic State capital in
northern Syria, since the weekend. Russia has also targeted the city
in retribution for the downing of a Russian airliner last month that
killed 224.
In Britain, police warned the government that planned budget cuts
may significantly reduce their ability to respond to a Paris-style
militant attack.
(Additional reporting; Writing by Giles Elgood, editing by Peter
Millership)
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