Third body found at scene of Paris attacks police raid in St Denis
The yet unidentified person had died in the seven-hour siege alongside ‘mastermind’ Abdelhamid Abaaoud
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 had died in the seven-hour siege in Saint Denis on Wednesday alongside Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Islamic State extremist suspected of planning the Paris attacks that left 129 people dead last Friday, and a woman thought to be his cousin, Hasna Aitboulahcen.
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EU ministers meeting in Brussels were set to announce radical changes to border security 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.”
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.