PARIS — The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was killed Wednesday in a massive predawn raid by French police commandos, two senior European officials said, after investigators followed leads that the fugitive Islamic State terrorist was holed up north of the French capital and could be plotting another wave of violence.
More than 100 police officers and soldiers stormed an apartment building in Saint-Denis, a bustling suburb home to many immigrants, during a seven-hour siege that left at least two dead, officials said. The dead included the suspected overseer of the Paris bloodshed, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, according to the two senior officials.
Abaaoud, a Belgian terrorist, had once boasted that he could slip easily between Europe and strongholds of the Islamic State in Syria.
Paris prosecutor François Molins, speaking to reporters hours after the siege, said he could not provide the identities of the people killed at the scene. A French security official declined to confirm or deny that Abaaoud had died.
But the two senior European officials, from different countries and who have followed the case closely, said they had received reports from French authorities that Abaaoud was identified as one of those killed in the raid.
It was not immediately clear how Abaaoud died — whether in police gunfire, by his own hand or in a suicide blast triggered by a woman in the apartment.
After the raid, forensics experts combed through blown-out windows and floors collapsed by explosions, presumably seeking DNA and other evidence.
Molins said a discarded cellphone helped identify safe houses used by attackers to plan Friday’s coordinated assaults, which killed 129 people and wounded more than 350 in a series of attacks at a stadium, concert halls and restaurants across Paris.
Molins said police launched the raid after receiving a witness tip suggesting that Abaaoud was “entrenched” on the third floor of the Saint-Denis building. He said that neither Abaaoud nor another suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was among eight people who were arrested at the apartment and surrounding locations Wednesday. Three people were arrested in the raid itself, one of whom suffered a gunshot wound in the arm, he said.
Molins said the sophisticated terrorist cell used three different safe houses around Paris — including the Saint-Denis apartment — and three rental cars to launch the attack. It was “a huge logistics plan, meticulously carried out,” he said.
Abaaoud was the target of a major dragnet in the international search, which stretches from Belgium to Syria, for suspects in Friday’s carnage.
Supporters of the Islamic State, the terrorist group whose vast domain straddles Syria and Iraq, have vowed to inflict repeated attacks on the West, including in Europe.
The raid was in part a response to what French officials thought was a plan to stage a follow-up terrorist attack in La Defense, a financial district northwest of Paris, two police officials and an investigator close to the investigation said.
Five days after the worst violence on French soil since World War II, European nations remained on edge, enhancing vigilance against possible attacks by Islamist terrorists who have promised to bring the brutal tactics employed in Iraq and Syria to the West.
President François Hollande, seeking to reassure French citizens unnerved by the bloodshed on the streets of Paris, said the attacks would not alter the French way of life.
Jean-Michel Fauvergue, chief of the elite police unit that carried out Wednesday’s raid, said the operation began at 4:16 a.m. with an attempt to blast open the third-floor apartment door with explosives. But the reinforced door would not open properly, and the element of surprise was lost, he said. The terrorists inside then blocked the door with a heavy object.
French media identified the suicide bomber as Hasna Aitboulahcen, a cousin of Abaaoud’s. The 26-year-old French citizen is a former manager of Beko Construction, a company in Epinay-sur-Seine, a town north of Saint-Denis. The company closed in 2014.
Fauvergue said hundreds of shots were exchanged and each side threw projectiles.
As the raid progressed, heavily armed police clad in military gear — some with their faces covered by balaclavas — moved quickly through the dark streets, while sharpshooters were posted on nearby buildings.
Helicopters scanned from the skies, and police used a drone and two robots to conduct surveillance. For hours, traffic and public transportation were halted, and schools were shuttered.
