A woman blew herself up and a suspected extremist was killed during a huge police assault in Paris Wednesday targeting the suspected mastermind of last week’s attacks in the capital.
A woman blew herself up and a suspected extremist was killed during a huge police assault in Paris Wednesday targeting the suspected mastermind of last week's attacks in the capital.
Gunfire and explosions rocked the Saint-Denis area in the north of the capital near the Stade de France stadium from before dawn as terrified residents were evacuated or told to stay in their homes.
Authorities arrested seven people, while five police officers suffered minor injuries in the operation which turned into a seven-hour stand-off between security forces and a group of people holed up in an apartment.
Gunfire first rang out in the darkness at around 4.00am (0300 GMT) in the streets close to where three suicide bombers had detonated their explosives outside the stadium at the start of Friday's attacks.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said telephone surveillance and witness reports "led us to believe" that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of Friday's series of attacks in Paris that killed 129 people, had been in the apartment.
However, Molins added it was too early to say if he was among those arrested or killed.
Abaaoud is an ISIL (so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Levant) militant who was previously thought to be in Syria after fleeing raids in his native Belgium earlier this year.
The raid came after footage from the scene of one of Paris attacks revealed a ninth suspect may have taken part. It is known that seven were killed in the carnage on Friday, most after detonating suicide belts.
It was not clear if the ninth man was one of two suspected accomplices detained in Belgium or was still on the run, potentially with 26-year-old fugitive Frenchman Salah Abdeslam who took part in the attacks with his suicide-bomber brother Brahim.
Police also carried out multiple raids in southwest France. The operations were part of an anti-terrorism strategy but not directly linked to the Paris attacks, an investigator said.
French President Francois Hollande was to hold discussions Wednesday on extending to three months the state of emergency declared after the worst attacks in French history. Lawmakers will vote on the proposal on Thursday and Friday.
