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 After a tip-off from Morocco that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, one of
Islamic State's most high-profile European recruits, was in France,
police honed in on Hasna Aitboulahcen, a woman already under
surveillance who was known to have links to him.
Police tapping her phone as part of a drugs investigation tracked
her to the St. Denis suburb north of Paris, also home to the stadium
where three suicide bombers blew themselves up during last Friday's
attacks that killed 130 people.
They watched the 26-year-old woman take Abaaoud into the St. Denis
building on Tuesday evening. In the early hours of Wednesday, police
launched an assault that lasted seven hours.
Abaaoud, 28, and Aitboulahcen, who may be his cousin, both died
during the gun battle during which French police commandos fired
more than 5,000 shots. A third person, who has yet to be identified,
died with them.
Officials initially said Aitboulahcen had blown herself up, becoming
Europe's first female suicide bomber, but a source close to the
investigation said on Friday that a head blasted into the street by
an explosive vest was not hers.
 One of the police sources also said Abaaoud had been caught on
camera at a suburban metro station, after the shootings and at cafes
and restaurants in central Paris but while a massacre in the
Bataclan concert hall was still underway.
He was seen on closed circuit TV at the Croix de Chavaux station in
Montreuil, not far from where one of the cars used in the attacks
was found, the source said.
A week after the Paris attacks, French nationals were in the firing
line again in Mali when Islamist militants stormed a hotel in the
capital Bamako leaving at least 27 people dead although France's
defence minister said he was not aware that any French were among
those killed.
HOUSE ARRESTS
In response to the Paris attacks, French police carried out raids
across the country for a fifth day overnight on Thursday.
So far, police have searched 793 premises, held 90 people for
questioning, put 164 under house arrest and recovered 174 weapons
including assault rifles and other guns, the Interior Ministry said
on Friday.
Police searched a mosque in Brest in western France early on Friday.
Its imam, Rachid Abou Houdeyfa, who has condemned the Paris attacks,
achieved notoriety this year for telling children they could be
turned into pigs for listening to music.
In an unusual step, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) -
the main umbrella group for mosque associations - and several of its
member groups, urged their imams to denounce the attacks in Friday
sermons and distributed suggested texts.
A bill to extend a state of emergency imposed a day after the Paris
attacks into February and which would give the police more powers,
received a final approval from the upper house of parliament on
Friday.
Since the attacks, requests for information about joining the French
army have surged. Colonel Herve Chene, head of airforce recruitment,
said the numbers of people visiting his unit's hiring centres had
tripled since last Friday.
 DISOWNED
Abaaoud was spotted on the metro station CCTV tape at 10:14 p.m.
(2114 GMT) on Friday last week after the initial wave of attacks.
Seven assailants died and a suspected eighth person, Salah Abdeslam,
is still on the run.
Abaaoud was a petty criminal who went to fight in Syria in 2013 and
European governments thought he was still there until Morocco said
he was actually in France.
He is believed to have recruited young men to fight for Islamic
State from immigrant families in his native Brussels district of
Molenbeek and elsewhere in Belgium and France.
Abaaoud appeared in Islamic State's slick online English-language
magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of crossing European borders to
stage attacks. He claimed to have escaped a continent-wide manhunt
after a police raid in Belgium in January in which two militants
died.
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Islamic State, which controls parts of Iraq and Syria, has attracted
thousands of young Europeans and Abaaoud was seen as a leading
figure in luring others, particularly from Belgium.
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.
Moroccan authorities, who have detained scores of Islamic State
militants in recent months, also arrested Abaaoud's brother Yassine
last month after he arrived in Agadir, a Moroccan security source
said on Friday.
Morocco's king is in France and met French President Francois
Hollande on Friday.
VIA GREECE
While quickly tracking Abaaoud 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.
Two of the men who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France
stadium last Friday travelled together to Greece and had their
fingerprints taken there on Oct. 3, the Paris prosecutor said in a
statement on Friday.
EU interior and justice ministers in Brussels on Friday pledged
solidarity with France in the wake of the attacks and agreed a
series of new measures on surveillance, border checks and gun
control.
The 28 governments agreed to speed new legislation to share air
passengers' data, curb firearms trafficking and ensure closer checks
on EU citizens crossing Europe's external borders.
France has called for changes to the EU's Schengen border-free
travel zone to make it tougher to travel across Europe. 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.
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.
The attacks in Mali were another slap in the face for France, which
has stationed 3,500 troops in northern Mali that are meant to be
restoring stability and security after a Tuareg rebellion was
hijacked by al Qaeda linked fighters in 2012.
"It is the same terrorists under different names who are fighting us
and who we are fighting. It will be a long war," French Prime
Minister Manuel Valls told reporters.
(Additional reporting by Chine Labbe, John Irish, Emmanuel Jarry,
Alan Charlish and Tom Heneghan in Paris, Pierre-Henri Allain in
Rennes, Francesco Guarascio and Alastair Macdonald in Brussels,
Tiemoko Diallo in Bamako; writing by Giles Elgood and David Clarke;
editing by Anna Willard)
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