At least two die in police raid on group planning new Paris attack
A woman suicide bomber blew herself up in a police raid on November 18 that sources said had foiled a jihadi plan to hit Paris's business district, days after a wave of attacks killed 129 across the French capital.
Police stormed an apartment in the Paris suburb of St. Denis before dawn in a hunt for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian militant accused of masterminding the bombings and shootings, but by evening it was still unclear if he had died in the assault.
Heavily armed officers triggered a massive firefight and multiple explosions when they entered the building. Eight people were arrested and forensic scientists were working to confirm if two or three militants had died in the violence.
"A new team of terrorists has been neutralized," Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters on November 18 evening, saying police had fired 5,000 rounds of munitions into the apartment, which was left shredded by the raid, its windows blown out and the facade riddled with bullet impacts.
A source close to the investigation said the dead woman might have been Abaaoud's cousin, while the Washington Post quoted senior intelligence officials as saying Abaaoud himself had died in the shoot out.
Molins said none of the bodies had been identified, adding only that Abaaoud was not amongst those detained.
In a sign too that Islamic State supporters were active elsewhere in France, a Jewish teacher was stabbed in the southern French port of Marseilles by three people professing solidarity with the militant group, prosecutors said.
One of the three wore an Islamic State t-shirt while another attacker showed a picture on his mobile telephone of Mohamed Merah, a homegrown Islamist militant who killed seven people in attacks in southern France in 2012. The Marseilles teacher's life was not in danger.
Police were led to the apartment in St. Denis following a tip-off that the 28-year-old Abaaoud, previously thought to have orchestrated the November 13 attacks from Syria, was actually in France.
Investigators believe the attacks -- the worst atrocity in France since World War Two - were set in motion in Syria, with Islamist cells in neighboring Belgium organizing the mayhem.