French Authorities Identify Body of Suspected Ringleader of Paris Attacks

    An undated portrait of Abdelhamid Abaaoud published in Islamic State’s English-language magazine Dabiq. (AP)

The Paris prosecutor’s office has confirmed that the body of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the deadly attacks that killed 129 people in Paris last week, has been found.

The Guardian reports:

The Paris prosecutor’s office said in brief statement that Abaaoud, who was thought to have been in in Syria since 2014 but is known to have returned to Europe on at least one occasion since, was one of two people killed in a ferocious firefight with police at a terrorist hideout north of Paris on Wednesday.

The mutilated body of the 27-year-old Belgian extremist, linked with several terrorist attacks in Europe, was found in the rubble of the badly damaged apartment in rue du Corbillon, St-Denis, the prosecutor’s office said, and identified from skin samples.

The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said Abaaoud played a “decisive role” in the Paris attacks and had been involved in four of six terror plots that French intelligence services had foiled this year.

The jihadi was the subject of both a European and an international arrest warrant, Cazeneuve said, yet no EU intelligence service had alerted France that he was on European soil, with information – from a non-European agency – that Abaaoud may recently have been in Greece only reaching France on 16 November, three days after the attacks.

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— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.