Paris terror attacks: Terrorist identified; as Israel gives France intelligence on attacks

Multiple sources have said that a severed finger found at the Bataclan theatre, where three gunmen killed 89 people during a concert on Friday night, belonged to Omar Ismaïl Mostefai, a petty criminal of Algerian origin.

Paris prosecutor François Molins said the suspect was born in the poor southern Paris suburb of Courcouronnes, and had been flagged as a radicalisation risk in 2010 but “never been implicated in an investigation or a terrorist association”.

A property in Courcouronnes linked to Mostefai was searched on Saturday, and his father, brother and brother’s sister were detained by police. It emerged on Sunday that the getaway vehicle used in the attacks on a number of restaurants and bars in Paris had been found in Montreuil, an eastern suburb of the French capital.

Molins also said that a Syrian passport, belonging to a man born in 1990 who was not known to the French authorities, had been found lying close by the bodies of two other jihadis, who both blew themselves up in the course of their attacks.

In Greece, citizen protection minister, Nikos Toskas, said earlier that the passport’s holder had entered the European Union through the Greek island of Leros on 3 October, adding: “We do not know if the passport was checked by other countries through which the holder likely passed.”

Reports that a second Syrian suspect had entered Europe via Greece were denied by a Greek official. “These reports are untrue and need clarification,” the official said.

The burgeoning investigation spread to Belgium on Saturday where homes were raided and three people were arrested in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, hours after another trio were arrested at the French-Belgian border in a car allegedly used in the attacks.

Molins said one of the vehicles driven by the Paris terrorists was registered in Belgium and hired by a French national living there.

He said at least 129 people were killed and 352 more injured – including 90 critically – in the attacks by three separate teams on the Stade de France, a city-centre concert hall and a series of packed cafes and bars.

Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the atrocities, which the French president, François Hollande, denounced as an “act of war” that must be countered “mercilessly”.

In southern Germany, the Bavarian state premier, Horst Seehofer, said there was “reason to believe” that a man arrested last week during a routine motorway check with “many machine guns, revolvers and explosives” in his car might “possibly be linked” to the attacks.

Isis said it had dispatched eight jihadi – leaving open the possibility that one may still be on the run – wearing suicide bomb belts and carrying machine guns, across the French capital on Friday night in a “blessed attack on … crusader France”.

The “carefully selected” sites and coordinated nature of the attacks were intended, it said, to show that France would remain one of its main targets as long as its present policies continue.

“France and those who follow her voice must know that they remain the main target of Islamic State and that they will continue to smell the odour of death for having led the crusade, for having boasted of fighting Islam in France and striking Muslims in the caliphate with their planes,” the group said in a statement.

Molins said the men, who he said operated in three separate teams in the Seat and a black Volkswagen Polo car, all wore identical suicide vests carrying a charge of TATP (triacetone triperoxide) and fitted with batteries and a detonator. They also carried Kalashnikov-style automatic rifles, he said.

The Swedish, Belgian, Romanian and Italian governments said their citizens were among those killed, while at least one Briton and an American were also confirmed dead. Frantic friends and relatives took to social media, using the Twitter hashtag #rechercheParis, to appeal for information about the missing.

Hollande described the attacks as “cowardly” and “an act of war” that had been “prepared, organised and planned from outside the country by Islamic State, but with help from inside”. He added: “We will be merciless toward the barbarians of Islamic State group. Faced with war, the country must take appropriate action.” He did not say what form that action might take.

These were attacks “against France, against the values that we defend everywhere in the world, against what we are: a free country that means something to the whole planet”, the president said, calling for “unity and courage”. France would observe three days of official mourning, he said.

The carefully orchestrated series of attacks began at 9.20pm outside the Stade de France stadium outside north of Paris, where three suicide bombers detonated their explosive belts in the course of about 20 minutes. Hollande, who was attending a friendly football match between France and Germany at the stadium, had to be evacuated by his security guards to the interior ministry.

The Wall Street Journal reported that at least one of the attackers at the Stade de France had a ticket to the France-Germany friendly match on Friday night and tried to enter the venue, citing a security guard who was on duty, as well as French police. The guard said the attacker was discovered wearing an explosives vest when he was searched at the entrance to the stadium about 15 minutes after the game started.

Shortly afterwards, three gunmen entered a popular concert hall in the capital’s north-eastern 11th arrondissement, while others opened fire on a string of cafes and restaurants not far away, crowded on a mild November evening.

The attacks came despite France – one of the founding members of the US-led coalition carrying out airstrikes against Isis positions in Iraq and Syria – being on a high state of alert for possible terrorist attacks in the run-up to a global climate conference later this month.

Under the first national state of emergency to be declared in France since 1961, an extra 1,500 soldiers were mobilised to reinforce police in Paris, Hollande’s office said. All Saturday’s sports events in the capital were cancelled, while many major shops, department stores, museums and tourist sites – including the Louvre, Eiffel Tower and Disneyland – stayed closed. Several metro stations were also shut.

Isis also released an undated video on Saturday calling on Muslims to continue attacking France. Its foreign media arm, al-Hayat Media Centre, filmed a number of militants – apparently French citizens – sitting cross-legged in an unidentified location and burning their passports.“As long as you keep bombing you will not live in peace. You will even fear travelling to the market,” one of the militants, identified as “Abu Maryam the Frenchman”, told the camera. Addressing his fellow jihadis, he added: “Indeed, you have been ordered to fight the infidel wherever you find him. What are you waiting for?”

As Parisians queued in their hundreds to give blood at a hospital close to a concert hall where the majority of the victims died, a Muslim community leader, Nadir Kahia, said he feared a “tsunami of hatred” against Muslims and residents of the capital’s poorer districts in the wake of the attacks.

The deadliest assault was at the Bataclan, a popular concert hall a few hundred metres from the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine hit along with a Jewish supermarket by Islamist militants in January during a three-day onslaught that left 20 people dead, including three Islamist gunmen.

Witnesses said the militants marched into the venue, where more than 1,000 people had gathered to hear the Californian rock band Eagles of Death Metal, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and shouting “Allahu akbar”. At least 89 people lost their lives in the ensuing carnage, Molins said, while dozens more were taken hostage for nearly three hours until armed riot police stormed the building at about midnight.

“They didn’t stop firing. There was blood everywhere, corpses everywhere. Everyone was trying to flee,” said Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who was at the concert. Other survivors said three of the attackers detonated their suicide belts as the security forces burst in.

Video footage shot from outside the venue showed dead bodies lying in the street, dozens of people running away from the entrance and survivors pulling the injured to safety. One witness described the scene as a bloodbath.

The other shootings were at bars and restaurants on the Rue de Charonne, where 18 people lost their lives; Boulevard Voltaire, where one person died; Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, where five were killed; and Rue Alibert, where 14 were shot dead.

Mark Colclough, a British-Danish psychotherapist, was on the Rue de la Fointaine au Roi in the 11th arrondissement when a gunman opened fire on patrons inside.

“He was standing in a shooting position,” Colclough said. “He had his right leg forward and he was standing with his left leg back. He was holding up to his left shoulder a long automatic machine gun. It was fully intentional, professional bursts of three or four shots. Everything he was wearing was tight, no zippers or collars.

“Everything was toned black. A man in military uniform, black jumper, black trousers, black shoes or boots and a machine gun.”

The slaughter brought immediate international condemnation, with Barack Obama calling it “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share”. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said she was deeply shaken.

David Cameron said the UK “must be prepared for a number of British casualties”from the Paris atrocity and condemned the “brutal and callous murderers”. The Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said his country “shared the sadness and the pain of the French people”. Terrorist crimes “cannot be justified”, he said. “The Paris tragedy requires of us all to unite in the fight against extremism, to bring a strong answer to terrorists’ actions.”

Pope Francis also condemned the killings as inhuman acts that left him shaken and pained. “There is no justification for these things,” he told a Catholic TV station.

The attacks follow a narrowly averted disaster in August, when an Islamist gunman was overpowered on a packed high-speed train in northern France.

Meanwhile, Israel’s spy services are helping France investigate the Paris gun and bomb attacks, Israeli media said, with one radio station suggesting the assistance drew on surveillance of militant groups in Syria and Iraq.

Israel had no advance warning of Friday’s rampage that killed at least 129 people, but within hours of it happening gave France information about some of the Islamic State militants who claimed to have carried it out, the top-rated television station Channel Two said, quoting an unnamed senior Israeli official.

Without providing details, Channel Two said Israeli intelligence saw a “clear operational link” between the attack in the French capital, Thursday’s Beirut suicide bombings and the Oct. 31 downing of a Russian airliner in the Egyptian Sinai.

Israeli spy services are monitoring Syria and Iraq – where Islamic State insurgents have conquered swathes of territory – which may have yielded intelligence on the organization of the Paris attacks, Israel’s Army Radio said.

Israeli officials contacted had no comment, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters on Saturday: “I’ve instructed Israel’s security and intelligence services to assist their French counterparts and counterparts from other European countries in any way possible.”

A Western diplomat said last year that Israel was providing the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State with information gleaned from international travel databases about Western citizens suspected of joining the insurgents.