Third body found at scene of Paris attacks police raid in St-Denis

Paris prosecutor says an as yet unidentified person died with alleged ringleader and woman in seven-hour siege 

The scene of the seven-hour siege in St-Denis, Paris. Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA

A third body has been found in a terrorist hideout north of Paris that was the scene of a ferocious shootout with police, French officials said, as European Union ministers met for emergency talks on tightening border security.

The Paris public prosecutor said a third, as yet unidentified person died in the seven-hour St-Denis siege on Wednesday alongside Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the jihadi suspected of planning the Paris attacks that left 129 people dead last Friday, and a woman now formally identified as his cousin.


EU ministers meeting in Brussels were set to agree radical changes to border security arrangements after it emerged that Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian national living in Syria, had been able to enter Europe and travel round the bloc seemingly at will.

“Terrorists are crossing the borders of the European Union,” the French interior minister, Bernard Cazaneuve, said at the opening of the meeting, calling on ministers to adopt urgently an EU-wide system for airline passenger information. “We can’t take any more time. This is urgent.”


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Abaaoud had been linked with half a dozen terror plots in Europe and was thought to have been in Syria. But despite being the subject of European and international arrest warrants, he was able to enter Europe unnoticed and make his way to the French capital.


Police told French media on Friday they had recovered CCTV footage of Abaaoud filmed in the Paris metro at around 10pm on the night of the attacks. The jihadi was captured by two security cameras at the Croix de Chavaux station near Montreuil on line nine, close to where a Belgian-registered Seat car was later found with three Kalashnikov assault rifles inside.

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said on Thursday night that members of the Brussels-based cell that carried out the attacks had taken advantage of Europe’s migrant crisis to “slip in” to France.

The EU’s 26-nation, passport-free Schengen zone would be “jeopardised” if Europe did not considerably improve border security, he added, while warning there was no such thing as zero risk. The terrorist threat, Valls said, would be “long and permanent”.
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No EU intelligence agency was able to warn France that Abaaoud, who is of Moroccan origin and carries a Belgian passport, had arrived in Europe ahead of the attacks on the national stadium, a concert hall and a string of central Paris bars and restaurants.

Foreign, non-EU intelligence, based on mobile phone surveillance, indicating the Isis militant had recently been in Greece did not reach Paris until 16 November, three days after the attacks.

Abaaoud was also checked by police at Cologne-Bonn airport on his way to Istanbul in early 2014, German officials said, but was allowed to go as they had no instructions to stop him.

All five of the seven jihadis who were shot dead or blew themselves up in the Paris carnage and whose bodies have have been identified – including four Frenchmen – recently spent time in Syria, officials have said.

The fifth was a foreigner carrying a Syrian passport, who was fingerprinted in Greece last month and later claimed asylum in Serbia – sparking worries that extremists could be posing as refugees to enter Europe unnoticed.

A national memorial ceremony for those killed in the attacks will be held at Les Invalides in Paris on 27 November, two weeks to the day after the attack, it was announced on Friday. France’s Republican Guard will carry a photograph of every victim of the attacks.

The EU’s interior and justice ministers are set to announced tougher checks on all travellers, including EU passport holders, at the external borders of the Schengen zone, as an emergency measure.

The meeting followed an announcement by Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, that the EU police agency’s database now contained the names of 28,000 people in the EU who needed monitoring for possible terror links, including the confirmed names of 2,000 foreign fighters who had been to Syria from EU countries.

The EU ministers also discussed the creation of a new European intelligence service – a “European FBI” – and giving new counter-terrorism powers to the Warsaw-based border agency Frontex.

Abaaoud’s cousin, Hasna Aitboulahcen, who blew herself up by detonating an explosive vest, was formaly identified on Friday after a long delay due to the condition of her body and the dangerous state of the partly collapsed building.

Her brother told AFP she had become radicalised only around six months ago. “She was unstable, she created her own bubble. She wasn’t looking to study religion. I have never even seen her open a Qur’an,” he said.

Abaaoud, who French officials say was implicated in four of the six planned terrorist attacks they have foiled this year, reportedly joined Isis in 2013. He was suspected of organising a terror cell in Verviers, Belgium, which was broken up in a shootout with police in January, and involvement in a thwarted attack in August on a Thalys train.

A cross-border manhunt continues for another of the supposed attackers, 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, whose brother Brahim blew himself up in the attacks. Belgian media on Friday quoted a friend as saying Salah Abdeslam was holed up in Molenbeek, the Brussels suburb to which many of the attackers, including Abaaoud, were linked.

The French parliament has voted to extend the state of emergency declared after the attacks to three months. A battery of further security measures is being prepared, including stripping French dual nationals convicted of terrorism of citizenship, placing under house arrest anyone considered a public threat, and allowing police to carry out searches without a judge’s approval.

At the United Nations in New York, meanwhile, France is pushing for what is in effect a security council declaration of war against Isis, with a resolution calling on members to “take all necessary measures” to defeat the terror group in the wake of the Paris attacks. French officials at the UN have circulated a draft declaration calling on countries to “redouble and co-ordinate their efforts” against Isis. It is understood the resolution has been worded to encourage unity so it can be swiftly pushed forward.