A woman has blown herself up and a suspect was shot dead during a police raid on a flat in a Paris suburb, while seven arrests were made.<\/p>\n
Police targeted the flat in Saint-Denis in a search for the alleged mastermind of Friday’s gun and bomb attacks in Paris, when 129 people were killed.<\/p>\n
The fate of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, previously thought to be in Syria, is still unclear.<\/p>\n
Prosecutor Francois Molins said intelligence indicated he was in Paris.<\/p>\n
All victims of Friday’s attacks – which targeted a concert hall, cafes and the Stade de France stadium and were claimed by the so-called Islamic State (IS) group – have now been identified, the government said.<\/p>\n
Follow the latest live events<\/strong><\/p>\n The operation in Saint-Denis – where the Stade de France is located – began at 04:20 (03.20 GMT).<\/p>\n Speaking from the scene afterwards, Mr Molins said it had been ordered after phone taps and surveillance operations suggested Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, could be there.<\/p>\n The prosecutor said a young woman – said by France’s BFMTV to be a relative of Abaaoud – had detonated her explosives belt soon after the raid began.<\/p>\n Another suspect was killed by grenades and police bullets, Mr Molins said.<\/p>\n Five members of the RAID police anti-terrorism unit were lightly injured while a RAID “assault dog”, a seven-year-old Belgian Shepherd called Diesel, was killed.<\/p>\n Three men were arrested in the apartment. Two others were found hiding in rubble and a further two – including the man who provided the lodging – were also detained, he said.<\/p>\n He did not give the identities of those detained.<\/p>\n Multicultural Saint-Denis: by the BBC’s Cagil Kasapoglu<\/strong><\/p>\n Saint-Denis is a multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic suburb or banlieue. There are Africans, Indians, Chinese, Turkish and many more from different backgrounds.<\/p>\n Many have “sans-papiers” status – meaning they do not yet have a legal status and an ID which would allow them to find a job.<\/p>\n During my visit to Saint-Denis on Tuesday, I heard quite a lot of “us versus them” when people talked about the “Parisians” and themselves in the banlieues.<\/p>\n Saint Denis youths unmoved by attacks<\/strong><\/p>\n As the operation got under way, roads were blocked off around Rue de la Republique in Saint-Denis, by lorry-loads of soldiers and armed police.<\/p>\n Local residents, who were urged to stay indoors, spoke of hearing continuous gunshots and large explosions.<\/p>\n Amine Guizani told the Associated Press: “They were shooting for an hour, non-stop. There were grenades. It was going, stopping, Kalashnikovs, starting again.”<\/p>\n French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised the security forces for operating “under fire for a number of hours in conditions that we have never seen before today”.<\/p>\n The near simultaneous attacks on Friday Friday left more than 400 people wounded, with 221 still in hospital, 57 of them in intensive care.<\/p>\n European countries are on high alert. On Tuesday evening, a football friendly between Germany and the Netherlands was cancelled shortly before kick-off and two Air France planes heading to Paris from the US were diverted because of security threats.<\/p>\n IS said it had carried out the attacks in response to France’s air campaign against its leadership in Syria, and pledged further bloodshed.<\/p>\n French President Francois Hollande said on Wednesday that IS threatened the whole world and he would be seeking a “large coalition” to work together to defeat the militant group.<\/p>\n What is Islamic State?<\/strong><\/p>\n IS is a notoriously violent Islamist group which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq. It has declared its territory a caliphate – a state governed in accordance with Islamic law – under its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.<\/p>\n What does it want?<\/strong><\/p>\n IS demands allegiance from all Muslims, rejects national borders and seeks to expand its territory. It follows its own extreme version of Sunni Islam and regards non-believers as deserving of death.<\/p>\n How strong is IS?<\/strong><\/p>\n IS projects a powerful image, partly through propaganda and sheer brutality, and is the world’s richest insurgent group. It has about 30,000 fighters but is facing daily bombing by a US-led multi-national coalition, which has vowed to destroy it. A woman has blown herself up and a suspect was shot dead during a police raid on a flat in a Paris suburb, while seven arrests were made. Police targeted the flat in Saint-Denis in a search for the alleged mastermind of Friday’s gun and bomb attacks in Paris, when 129 people were killed. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":167792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-167791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/167792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n–
\nBy: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"