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Police hunt Paris suspect dubbed "public enemy number one"

Police in Italy are searching for a suspect in the Paris attacks who is believed to be driving a ...
Newstalk
Newstalk

15.18 16 Nov 2015


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Police hunt Paris suspect dubb...

Police hunt Paris suspect dubbed "public enemy number one"

Newstalk
Newstalk

15.18 16 Nov 2015


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Police in Italy are searching for a suspect in the Paris attacks who is believed to be driving a black Seat in the Turin area.

The suspect is believed to be 32-year-old Baptiste Burgy who is in a car with the number plate GUT18053.

Another black Seat used by the terrorists to shoot people in restaurants on Friday night was found abandoned in the Paris suburb of Montreuil on Sunday morning.

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Kalashnikovs, bullet magazines and partial fingerprints were found inside the car.

Burgy is just one of a number of suspects being hunted across France, Belgium and wider Europe.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said 168 locations across France were raided overnight, and 104 people have been placed under house arrest in the past 48 hours.

Investigators have also named a suspect who was questioned and released by police hours after the massacres which left 129 people dead.

Salah Abdeslam, who has become known as "Public Enemy Number One", reportedly helped with logistics and rented a black Volkswagen Polo used by the gunmen who stormed the Bataclan concert hall and killed at least 89 people.

The 26-year-old was apparently spoken to by officers on Saturday morning when they pulled over a car carrying three people near the Belgian border.

Police then checked Abdeslam's ID and subsequently let him go but an international arrest warrant was then issued.

Raids have also been carried out in a suburb in Brussels called Molenbeek which is thought to have been home to other members of the militant Islamist cell that carried out the attacks.

The suspected mastermind of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, lived in Molenbeek before he went to Syria to fight with Islamic State.

Ibrahim Abdeslam, the brother of Salah, was reportedly among the seven suicide bombers in the co-ordinated assaults targeting six sites across the French capital.

A third brother was apparently arrested in Belgium and questioned before being released.

Samy Amimour, 28, blew himself up inside the Bataclan theatre.

Prosecutors said he was from Drancy in northeast Paris and had been charged in a terrorism investigation in 2012.

He had been placed under judicial supervision but dropped off the radar and was the subject of an international arrest warrant.

Three people in Amimour's family have been in custody since early on Monday.

A Syrian passport for Ahmad al Mohammad?, a 25-year-old born in Idlib, was found next to one of the suicide bombers after he died outside the national football stadium.

The identity of the man in the passport has not been verified but the prosecutor's office said fingerprints from the attacker match those of someone who passed through Greece in October.

Bilal Hadfi is another suicide bomber who also lived in Belgium, said the Washington Post.

Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old from Courcouronnes, a town 16 miles south of Paris in Essonne, has been officially identified as another assailant.

He was one of the terrorists inside the Bataclan and had been flagged for links to Islamic radicalism. His father and brother have been arrested.

French newspaper Le Monde said he was identified from a print from his severed finger, discovered after he detonated a suicide vest inside the Bataclan.

The Turkish authorities said they identified Mostefai as a possible "terror suspect" in October 2014.

They said French authorities were notified in December 2014 and in June 2015.


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