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Tapped Phone Led Paris Police to Terrorists' Hideout
Police watched the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks being led by a woman into an apartment the evening before both died there in a raid by special forces, a police source said on Friday.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. Posted by: Steve White 2015-11-23 |
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