A woman suicide bomber blew herself up and another militant died on Wednesday when police raided an apartment in the Paris suburb of St Denis seeking suspects in last week’s attacks in the French capital.
Three sources said the raid stopped a jihadist cell that had been planning an attack on Paris’s business district, La Défense, after coordinated bombings and shootings killed over 130 people across the city.
Officials said police had been hunting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian radical militant accused of masterminding the November 13 carnage, but more than nine hours after the launch of the pre-dawn raid it was still unclear if they had found him.
Seven people were arrested in the operation, which started with a barrage of gunfire, including three people who were pulled from the apartment, officials said.
“It is impossible to tell you who was arrested. We are in the process of verifying that. Everything will be done to determine who is who,” Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said at the end of the operation.
Molins said the assault was ordered after phone taps and surveillance operations led police to believe that Abaaoud might have been in St Denis, near to the Stade de France football stadium which was site of one of the attacks that hit Paris last week.
French prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants from Friday - four Frenchmen and a man who was fingerprinted in Greece last month after arriving in the country via Turkey with a boatload of refugees fleeing the Syria war.
Police believe two men directly involved in the assault subsequently escaped, including Salah Abdeslam, 26, a Belgian-based Frenchman who is accused of having played a central role in both planning and executing the deadly mission.
French authorities said on Wednesday they had identified all the November 13 victims. They came from 17 different countries, many of them young people out enjoying themselves at bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a soccer stadium.
Until Wednesday morning, officials had said Abaaoud was in Syria. He grew up in Brussels, but media said he moved to Syria in 2014 to fight with Islamic State. Since then he has travelled back to Europe at least once and was involved in a series of planned attacks in Belgium foiled by the police last January.
Two police sources and a source close to the investigation confirmed that the St Denis cell was planning a fresh attack. “This new team was planning an attack on La Défense,” one source said, referring to a high-rise neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris that is home to top banks and businesses.
A man in St Denis told reporters that he had rented out the besieged apartment to two people last week.
He was later arrested by police.
